


Jason Todd

by daaarkknight (orphan_account)



Category: Batman - All Media Types, DCU (Comics)
Genre: Comfort/Angst, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-16
Updated: 2019-12-28
Packaged: 2021-02-26 16:14:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 40
Words: 40,363
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21821065
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/daaarkknight
Summary: Everything that makes Jason Todd who he is, laid out and remembered. After all, those who forget their history...
Relationships: Barbara Gordon/Dick Grayson, Bruce Wayne/Selina Kyle, Clark Kent/Lois Lane, Dick Grayson & Jason Todd, Dick Grayson/Jason Todd, Jason Todd & Bruce Wayne, Stephanie Brown/Jason Todd
Comments: 127
Kudos: 123
Collections: Batman, Batman Universe Series, BatmanFanfiction, Drabbles for Jason, Favorite Batman Fics, Jason Rare Pair Challenge, Jason Todd's Origin Story (including AUs), Jason and Alfred's bonding moments, Red Hood fic that I like, alljason, batman orignal characters





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [FabulaRasa](https://archiveofourown.org/users/FabulaRasa/gifts), [Mithen](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mithen/gifts), [Unpretty](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Unpretty/gifts), [LemonadeGarden](https://archiveofourown.org/users/LemonadeGarden/gifts), [Chaseha_Wing](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chaseha_Wing/gifts).



"Walk with me."

They roam the streets of Gotham. Hand in hand. The lights puddle on the concrete. 

"Why're we doing this?"

Bruce looks down.

"I like to remind myself. What I'm--we're--fighting for."

The cobblestone is rough against their feet. 

"Life goes on, Jay."

"I got no idea what you're talking about, you crazy old man."

"Look around."

They're in Crime Alley. Ho hum. 

"Okay. Still doesn't justify you dragging me out of bed to roam the streets of Gotham _barefoot_ in my jammies."

Bruce ignores him. He cocks his head, listening. A tap drips somewhere. The alley flickers, neon streetlamps spilling into the dreamy cement cracks. _Gotham's cracks._

"This all feels like a very bad dream." Jason says, nudging Bruce to safety and remembrance. "Can we go home now?"

"No."

Jason snatches his hand away from Bruce. "I don't care _what_ kind of creepy old ritual this is, and I don't care _what_ it means to you. You're not the only one who's had something messed up happen to them in an alley, that's all."

Bruce looks down. Still, eyes deep. Boring into the back of Jason's head.

"I'm sorry," he says in a monotone, that rings false to Jason's ears. _He's not sorry. He's never been sorry in his entire fucking life._

_After the alley._

"I need...someone. I can't do it alone."

"Do _what_ alone?"

"Reach for the other side, Jason. Emerge. Unscathed."

Jason's ears wiggle. They always do that when he's uncertain. Something tells him this is some kinda initiation ritual, like into a cult. Some shitty test, or something. 

"Walk me to the other side."

Jason's body tenses up. He knows it isn't going to stop here. No. This is just the beginning. 

The first night of the rest of his life. 

He takes Bruce's hand. Like a child, dragging an unwilling adult into some dangerous fantasy world. Fairyland.

Together, they walk through the alley, the man and the boy. 

Bruce kneels on one block of stone, the color of chalk, placing his palms on the firm graininess of it. 

"This where it happened?" Jason asks softly.

Bruce hums. 

"I remember," he says. "Everything. After that night.

"Memory can be a curse, Jason. A curse that can never be undone."

_Great. He's gone off on one of his tangents. Memory, fate, destiny. Good and evil. God and the devil._

Jason feels a yawn coming up. He scratches himself. 

Bruce suddenly looks up, like whatever spell was binding him is over. He looks over at Jason, like he's surprised to see him standing there, with his hair a mussed-up halo framing his sleep-warmed face. 

"Um...yeah, uh, Pops? Hello?" Jason snaps his fingers in front of Bruce. 

"Jason." Bruce says, like he's seeing him for the first time. 

"What the _hell_ are we doing barefoot in our pajamas in a god-forsaken alleyin the middle of the night?" 


	2. Chapter 2

There was the time he'd eaten a cat. 

Well, it was either that, or starve. Jason had chosen starve at first. But then, the poor cat was hobbling along, flea-ridden, potbellied, and it was all too ugly, really.

Now he can barely look at a cat without flinching.

Then there was the time, in his dumpster-diving days, when he'd found an electric train. Jason was pretty handy with those sort of things. He'd set it up in no time, and watched the train go round and round, round and round. He wrapped himself tighter in his trench coat, and let the motions of the train soothe him to sleep.

_Choo choo._

Sometimes some sap or the other would take pity on him, and buy him a hot meal, and a few decent clothes. Once there was this old widow. Mrs. Silvester. She was blind and had a lot of puppies, and thought Jason was a girl.

He didn't correct her.

She gave him her granddaughter's frocks. "Too haughty to wear them, she is. But I have a feeling there're gonna suit you pretty well, my darling."

He thanked her, and put one on. It had red lace, and pink bow ties in the front. He twirled. 

"You're the prettiest girl in the world," said the kind old lady.

Jason felt a sting in his eyes. No one had ever called him pretty.

He loves cars. He wants to become a chauffeur when he grew up.

He scratches a list of all the different types of cars on a slate. Hatchback. Sedan. MPV. SUV. Crossover. Coupe. Convertible.

He's gonna drive each one.

Sometimes he reads newspapers. Or tries to. 

"Hey mister, could you tell me what this headline means?"

Sometimes they would tell him. Sometimes they were too busy, and would push him away. He learned to avoid the office-goers.

He would try to spell out the words. Bit by bit, they started making sense to him. At least the smaller ones. Like _street. Train. Lice. Lily._

_Mommy._

Jason did not understand what the big deal about birthdays was. 

Like, big deal. Everyone is born. 

So what? Why do you get to have a cake for doing what _everyone_ does? 

And so what if he didn't have a day, because he didn't know which day he was born? _Big frigging deal._

He looks in at this Christmas party. It's warm, and toasty, and Santa was sitting by the firelight, singing a carol with snotty children, who were singing it all wrong.

"Mommy, mommy!" one kid pipes up, pointing towards the window. "Look! There's an ugly little boy outside!" 

The entire party stops singing, and turns to the window. The mothers draw their hands over their mouths delicately, and draw their little children away from the window. Santa looks piqued. 

Jason moves on. 

He's staying at this homeless shelter for little kids. The kids here are all mean and hungry. There's vegetable soup for dinner here, and potato cutlets for supper, and sometimes they give you cake. If you're good.

They try to inject you with stuff, to stop you from catching bugs.

Once a week, they put the kids into 'study groups'. Jason gets tired. His eyes are swimming from all the textbooks and math problems. He just wants to be out in the open air.

He likes reading. But only _f_ _or fun._ He's going to become a driver anyway. What does he need so much maths for? 

Really, some people.

He starts stealing tires. Big tires, small tires. Winter, summer, all season. Wide tread, narrow tread. Jason thinks he could start the biggest collection of Gotham, if he didn't have to eat.

He's getting really good at it. He has these fences, all around the Lower East End, and he plays them off each other to get the best prices. He can make upto thirty bucks per tire, which pays enough to share a small room with a couple of other stinkers in the Narrows.

Until the day, that is, when Jay strikes the fucking gold mine. 

He can't believe it. It's just _standing_ there.

The most beautiful car in the world. 


	3. Chapter 3

The hood is shiny black steel. The car is all sleek, fluid curves, dripping with elegance. A moving predator. The bumper is an open maw, with spiny protrusions on either side, forming the chiseled head of a bat.

Jason steps forward, entranced. 

He runs his hands along the cool chrome, puts his cheek to its door, takes in the smell of guano and wet stone.

He has to have it. 

Jason is not an idiot. He knows _whose_ car this is. 

But it's an offer he can't refuse.

He gets to work.

He jacks up the front tires, the ones supposed to provide the most traction, and hence, he hopes, the most expensive. He dislocates his shoulder jacking up the monster, but he has work to do, so he pops it back in place. If he has to guess, he would say these are custom-refitted Michellin Pilot Sports. Could easily come up to one thousand bucks.

He could rent that apartment he'd seen on Craigslist. What was it called? Honeysuckle Hive or Bumsuckle Bee, or something like that.

He could get a job. Go to a decent night school, where they had extracurriculars, like French and dancing. He really wants to learn to do the cha-cha. Did they teach the cha-cha in night schools? Probably not. Never mind, he'd find another place.

And there was that girl. The barista he saw working at Coffee Central. What was her name? Stephanie something. Black. Brown. Purple. Whatever. She was pretty. He would ask her out.

As he takes off the last of the lug nuts, and pulls the tire free (finally) he decides that really, one is enough, who knows when the guy was coming back.

So he rolls away the small fortune that is the Batmobile tire, while Batman watches from behind him, hands on hips, hoping the boy would turn around and set himself up for a jump scare.

But Jason never turns behind. He hums softly to himself, rolling away the tire, then turns around and surveys the scene, one last time, satisfied.

On second thought...he rushes back, and hastily scrawls a note on the Batmobile hood with a piece of chalk he finds in his pants. 

_Sorry, mister. Gotta eat_


	4. Chapter 4

Batman had been busy consoling the widow of one of his informants, who was found out and ended up in the Hudson in sixteen frozen pieces.

Hence the late night visit to the Narrows. And the...injudicious choice of parking. Usually, people know better.

Until this one kid with too little meat on his bones, but swagger enough to make up for it, came in and waltzed away with his night. Bruce sighs. There's no way he's going after that kid now, not after seeing the state these people lived in--not after seeing firsthand the botched labours in which they were born, and the soiled sickbeds where they breathed their last.

He leans against the Batmobile. The urge to pray is powerful. The urge to thank. 

But thank for what? _There, but for the grace of God, go_ I? 

He opens the trunk to take out the kit and the spare. The bile his thick in his stomach. _Sorry mister, gotta eat_

He finishes putting on the tire, and takes out his smartphone. He activates the tracker on his stolen tire. 

(Compulsive tracking, Alfred calls it, when one day he finds a bat-tracker in Bruce's underwear)

_So sue me. I've never lost a thing in my life._

_Except my mind. Occasionally._

Jason drops into bed with a sigh. It's gonna be a long night. His veins are still buzzing with the heist. 

He looks up. 

Batman looks down from his rafters. 

"Hi," he smiles.

Jason screams. 


	5. Chapter 5

"So wait. Let me get this straight.

"You. Wanna take me to dinner.

"After I jacked your tire and shit."

"Well, to be fair, I _did_ scare the living daylights out of you. So we'll call it even."

"Alright, mister, you didn't scare jack shit out of me. So get that straight."

"Alright." Bruce's mouth quirks in an almost-smile. He likes this kid. He's got fight. Even if he _is_ currently sitting in piss-stained pants and pretending he isn't. 

"So. Mcdonald's, nothing fancy. You _did_ say you needed to eat."

Jason doesn't know how much longer he can take this guy. He can't get a solid read on him, is the thing. One minute he's jumping out of his rafters, and the next, he's offering to buy Jason a happy meal.

Jason scrubs at his face. The guy really needs a shower. There's body odour, and then there's _bat_ body odour, which is apparently another order of thing altogether. Although it would be rude to say as much to his face.

"You need to shower."

The guy looks by turns shocked, and confused, and hurt, and it's surprising, really, how much expressive mobility the mask has. Jason feels bad for him, almost.

"You can use mine."

Batman cocks his head to the side. A feat, given his cowl.

"And then _,_ McDonald's. I promise."

Jason starts to get worried. How he's going to explain to his roommates what Gotham's Dark Knight was doing singing in his shower is beyond him.

_Na-na-na-na-na_

"Alright, cut that out! Stop it! Just make it snappy, all right?"

Bruce heaves an aggrieved sigh. Singing in the shower is his one pleasure, such as it is, that remains to him.

"Somebody should have told you, for godsakes, that mankind has enough misery already on its head, without that _screeching_ that passes for your singing."

Bruce sticks his head out of the mildewed curtain, soap suds clinging to his hair. "You might have just stepped on a person's lifelong dream, with your unkind words."

"Trust me, I'm doing the world a favor. Now get out, before I come in there."

That gets him out.

They're sitting in a quiet spot, in the nearest fast food joint, away from the lights. Jason notices that Batman, or 'Bruce', as he calls himself, sits where his features would be obscured by shadow, his cap pulled down over his eyes.

He's either really paranoid, or really famous. Although if he was famous Jason would know him by now. 

"So...what do you do?"

'Bruce' arches one eyebrow.

"You know, besides... _that._ "

"Bats are nocturnal," he says, tone flat. He's ordered Jason two chocolate milkshakes, one mega-trifecta with extra cheese, and extra fries. He himself nibbles at a plate of onion rings. 

"You gonna eat those all onion rings by yourself?"

Bruce pushes his plate forward. "Help yourself."

"What part of me living in the Narrows equals me starving?"

"Sorry." Bruce scans Jason's sparse frame, but says nothing. He noticed the pile of unpaid bills, the stack of patched-up laundry, the scabs on Jason's forearms. He couldn't be older than fourteen, and yet his body is that of a twelve year old.

His eyes are--well. The less said about them the better. They're older than Bruce has seen them on any kid. 

Bruce feels at ease around Jason, just like he could be around Dick. _Himself_. Not afraid of triggering any hidden nerves, because Jason would let him know, in no uncertain terms, when he was stepping on one. 

He wants to get the kid home. But he'll have to reel him in slowly. Too fast and the kid would bolt, like a wild pony which has never tasted the bit.

Or he could just beg him. 

"I don't want you having to jack tires anymore." Bruce's face, tired after a long day of patrol, his suit grimy with caked mud, and his cape torn in numerous places, stands in Jason's tenement, pleading, with his hands spread out. The music pounds from the club below, sending vibrations into the chunky drywall. Like standing in a washing machine, hoping the drum wouldn't rotate. 

No one has ever pleaded with Jason. They've yapped. They've grimaced. They've spoken like speaking to him was an offense against their very humanity.

_Street rat._

And here was Batman, fucking Batman, treating him like he didn't have to be good for something, he didn't have to give, or _be_ better, or more dedicated, or _work harder,_ or make something of himself, to deserve dignity. _Come home._

"Okay."


	6. Chapter 6

"Hey. I'm Dick. 

"You can call me Dick."

Jason rolls his eyes. The boy standing in front of him might just be the most beautiful boy on Earth, with skin a deep-fried tan, mussed up raven hair falling to his shoulders, and morning blue eyes shot with specks of gold. 

Jason feels a frisson of jealousy, which is stupid. It's not like this is a beauty pageant. And he's not exactly ugly either, thank you very much.

"Imma call you prick, instead. If it's all the same to you."

Dick smiles, and _Jesus._ You would think the guy couldn't get any prettier, and then he flashed you his set of pearly whites.

"You can. But I wouldn't advise it, in front of Alfred."

"Who's Alfred?"

They're standing on the subway station, waiting for the stupid Bat to show up with Jason's stupid luggage. Jason had insisted he wasn't going to get in any BMWs with some rich father figure patting him on the back and carrying his luggage for him, not in front of his roommates. That would be an asshole move.

So Bruce had insisted he carry Jason's luggage for him, which fit in a duffel. Jason wouldn't be surprised if Bruce's thought process was something along the lines that Jason couldn't get away, or change his mind about getting away, if Bruce was holding his good underwear. Which was, of course, horseshit. Jason could make do with less, _had_ made done with less. Just the clothes on his back. But let the fancy rich guy moonlighting as the vigilante vampire think he has the edge.

And now Bruce is nowhere to be found. Wasn't that just swell.

"So wait. You've never heard of Bruce Wayne?"

Wayne. Wayne. Wayne. 

_Shit._

_Not Bruce_ Wayne.

It had been Wayne Foundation, that shelter. Thinking they could just _help_ kids with a shitload of issues by tucking them into mattresses and getting them to _talk_ about their issues, and filling their head with dreams of _you can be anything you want to be, just as long as you don't give up on yourself._

_Pissdrinking cuntlicking motherfucking shit!_

_Bruce Fucking Wayne._

How could he have missed it, all the fucking signs? The hero complex, the money dripping from his fucking designer pants and his designer car and his designer _son._

_Way to go, Jason. A fucking plus._

_Why stop here? Why not just go on and suck his cock and get a fucking handout? Go on, you're already a charity case. Go all the way, why don't you._

Dick is getting itchy under his skin. The Robin costume was barely too tight. He'd come home from patrol one night, swinging into the cave with its water dripping from the shower rocks on its ceiling and the bats folded asleep. Gone into the library and found Bruce asleep over the fireplace with his tablet in hand. Shaken him awake.

"Bruce. I'm done."

Bruce had rubbed his eyes with his knuckles, and folded the tablet into it's embossed cover. "What are you talking about, Dick. What's done."

"Me. Myself. This is not me anymore."

He indicated the blue and red tights, the close-fitting collar, the fluorescent cape.

"I can't breathe."

Bruce understood. It's not just about the collar, or the cape. He knew this day was coming from the first time his Robin donned his cape. 

Didn't mean he had to like it.

His rib cage felt too tight. 

"Bruce. It's got nothing to do with you."

Bruce cards his hair with his hands, palms callused with rough use. He rocks slightly. 

"So what do you want. To do."

He looks at Dick, trying to decipher his face. As if looking for answers in his hairline. In his jaw. 

Dick doesn't know the answer. All he knows is, he needs to molt. The costume doesn't slide on anymore like a second skin.

"I don't know. I'll have to find out."

Bruce nods his head mechanically. 

"Whatever you want." His lashes lower, an invisible blind being drawn. _Whatever you do can't hurt me anymore. I'm syrup, I'm change. I can take you._

 _"_ Fine."

"Okay."

Jason doesn't want to leave. He glowers, and mutters, and clenches his fists, ignoring Dick's forward glances into his life. He just wants to turn away. The station is crowding with four-o-clock office workers, humming and jostling and turning them on either side. Dick pulls Jason's arm into one corner of the crowded subway. He lights a cigarette, breathing in and exhaling with a distant sigh.

"Don't tell Bruce," is all he offers for fifteen minutes. 

"You don't like it." He says, after a while. 

"It's none of my business."

"What--no, I mean the adoption."

Jason hadn't asked what it meant, how far it was going to go, mostly because he didn't know if he would like the answer or not. 

"I don't know. I haven't thought about it much."

Dick makes a sound that may have been an answering grunt, or just an exhale. He wraps his coat around himself tighter. Jason notices he's wearing long sleeves, even though it's spring, and the air is quite balmy. 

"Do you suppose--" Jason begins, then stops suddenly. It was stupid. 

Dick looks at him quietly, assessing. That cold gaze is something he and Bruce share. 

"Do I suppose what."

"Nothing." Jason shakes his head. "Why do you...do that."

"Smoke?"

"Yeah."

"Smoking's the last thing that's gonna get to me, kid. Imma fucking congratulate myself if I make it to die of lung cancer, is what. I can tell you this," he lowers his voice confidentially, "because you're gonna be me someday. And that's if you're lucky. There is a best case scenario," he says, pointing to himself. "And then there's...well. Plenty of others, if you've got the imagination for it."

 _How about that. Boy Wonder is playing a little game behind Papa's back._ Well. Jason can play too. 

"Sorry. Sounds like you've had a rough time of it."

Dick eyes him. 

"You know, being fired and all," Jason says casually. 

Dick starts laughing brassily. He pats Jason on the back in a hearty faux-friendly slap. Jason stumbles forward. 

"You think I'm the asshole trying to get rid of you." He says, chewing on the end of his cigarette, leaning back, eyes on the trains. "Well guess what. I'm the asshole trying to get rid of you.

"We're a lovely fucking family. Yeah. Real cozy. Real tight. So tight, in fact, that it's not everybody's cup of tea."

_Look at that. Willing to throw Daddy under the bus to keep him to himself. Classy._

Everyone in Gotham thinks Robin is a cinnamon roll. But then, everyone thought Jason was a snake.

Jason doesn't want to get in the middle of whatever this is. Bruce--he hasn't even known the guy a week. But whatever he's done to this kid, it isn't good. It isn't who Jason wants to end up as. But then--

But then. There's Bruce, with his red-rimmed eyes, his heart in his hands. _I'll be damned if I let you stay here. Waiting. For something to pick you up. For someone to care._

And Jason had opened his mouth to object that no, he hasn't been waiting, he's never waited for anybody in his life, he didn't need nothing, he didn't need nobody, nobody needed him...

Nobody needed him. And how sad was that. How sad was it, that he was no one's be all end all, like Bruce clearly is, to Dick. How sad, that he was no one worth fighting for. Jason had gone all his life without asking for love, mostly because he'd learned to give it to himself. But sometimes his heart overflowed with joy, with affection, flowing _outwards,_ and he wouldn't know what to do, and he'd think of that flea-ridden cat, the one he'd roasted over a fire and eaten, and the breathlessness of it as he'd snapped its neck, the way it had not put up much of a fight, not any of it, because it didn't have anyone to fight for. Take me, at least I'll make a good meal, _be_ something. He'd imagined the cat had given itself up.

That was him, somewhere, deep inside. He'd give himself up one day, because he was fucking tired of meaning nothing to anyone but a pile of tires and grimy food bills and street cat and stolen frocks and baby food from the dumpster. Tired of adding up to so less.

"Fuck you," he looks up at Dick, defiantly tilting his chin. "Fuck you, and fuck your games. And I don't care if your dad is a perv, and I don't care if he's a psycho, and I don't care if you're using 'cause you can't take it. Because he _wants_ you. And at the end of the day you won't walk away, you're fighting with a street rat cause you're so afraid of losing him. Well guess what."

Dick studies him icily. 

"I've never felt wanted in my entire life. And that's why I'm staying. And I want you to shove it up your ass."


	7. Chapter 7

Bruce meets up with them on the train station. He hands Jason his duffel, and looks him and Dick over with a critical eye. 

"Where were you?" both boys chorus, then glare at each other.

"Making a cash withdrawal at an ATM." Bruce mentally notes that from the looks of it, they have been at each throats. 

"For twenty minutes? You know, we didn't have to wait like around like a pair of stooges." Dick says. 

"No, you did not. I was securing a more comfortable residence for Jason's housemates."

"You _what?"_ Jason asks. 

_"_ I have given instructions. Your roommates will be given adequate, sanitary housing by Wayne Foundation." 

This possibly was the cherry on the cake Jason had not known he was looking for. The guilt in his stomach which he was not even aware of melts.

"Uh--thank you, thanks." Jason says, looking down and fumbling with his zipper.

Dick's lips stretch in a rueful smile. His eyes are sad and grey, and Bruce is looking at him warily. He hopes Dick remembers how Bruce had taken care of Haly's circus and its staff. The last thing this kid needs is a bully for an older brother.

Dick wraps his arm around Jason, and smiles at him warmly. His eyes crinkle, like they do when Bruce gets him a butterscotch pop, or remembers his parents' marriage anniversary.

"Happy birthday, Jason."

Jason looks up, and shrugs off Dick's arm. "Not my birthday, dumbass."

"Is now," says Dick. And how did he know, that Jason didn't even know his own birthday? How had he guessed?

Jason feels warm and wary and exposed and vulnerable, all at the same time. He wraps his arms around his chest, in what he hopes does not look like he's giving himself a hug. Which he may be.

"Happy birthday, Jason." Bruce smiles.

26th November.

_Huh._

_So that's what it feels like._


	8. Chapter 8

Alfred turns out to be a mild-mannered mustachoed British pencil, complete with round eraser on top. He looks like somebody's grandfather. Probably Mr. Bean's.

Jason curtsies.

"Alfred can be your best friend, or your worst enemy. Stay on his good side at all times." Dick tells Jason, and leaves him to figure out the rest.

Hence the curtsy.

Alfred smiles and bows back. Jason wonders what would happen if he bent just slightly out of the correct angle. Would he snap? 

"This way, Master Jason." Alfred says, holding the deep ashen door open. He has a polished, good-natured voice, with a foreign inflection that Jason can't place. Maybe French? 

_Master Jason._

Whose master? Alfred's? 

He seriously doubts it. The hushed, awed tones with which Dick and Bruce spoke about Alfred gave Jason the impression that _he_ was the real master. 

Jason enters. 

The inside of the Manor strikes Jason as huge and gorgeous, and not in that order. He recognizes the style from one of those Renaissance books he's studied in the moments he snatched away to take refuge in Gotham library, quiet afternoons of day-dreaming as he flipped through the giant colored photographs of beautiful buildings.

The high triumphal arches, the venetian windows. It's Baroque. No, not showy enough. Palladian. The marble columns are encrusted with a beauty that can only come with age. The ceiling is high enough, but the main room--foyer? Whatever. It has a ginormous crystal chandelier. It's turned off, and yet it's the brightest thing in the room. He can only imagine what it looked like when it shone. 

Jason has always had an appreciation for beauty. This is exactly the sort of house he used to roam in his daydreams, passing hands over cool marble statues and running up and down staircases twice as wide as his room. 

And now he's going to be living in one.

He's supposed to feel elated, like a Disney princess. Transported to Neverland on a fairy horse, showered by her prince with diamonds and gold and promises that she would never go hungry again, never sweep the hearth, never sleep in cinders or feel the twitch of a pang in her heart.

How did the princess feel? When she twirled with her prince and the whole country watched and clapped and her mother and sisters rejoiced and wept at her good fortune, but not with jealousy, never with jealousy, because it was a fairy tale and everything was supposed to end happily ever after. Did she ever--ask herself, pinch herself if it was real? 

Was this a fairy tale?

Or the beginning of a nightmare? 


	9. Chapter 9

The Manor is quiet. Hushed, even. It sleeps, and it awakes. It has a life of its own. 

That first night, Jason has the first meal of his life. There are six courses. Deviled eggs, red vegetable soup, ravioli with sauce, something called a papaya salad, grilled pork tenderloin _\--Jesus--_ with a side of creamed spinach, and chocolate cake, last. Jason takes two helpings. Biting into the liquid orgasm of the rich, dark velvet, his pleasure buds shoot out. _O_ _h._

Alfred smiles. Finally someone who appreciates him. He wonders, cynically, how long that will take to change. The family's tired nights and the sleepless mornings, the hurried breakfasts, the cold meals, the clock ticking away the hours while the butler waits in the empty hall.

So yes, Jason eats. Because _are you kidding me this is like the greatest thing in the whole wide world dear God._ He's never going to stop.

Dick insists on going shopping for Jason. 

"You don't know how to shop for a 14-year-old, and neither does Alfred."

He's remembering an inhospitable walk-in closet full of blazers and neckties and fucking _turtlenecks. Black ones._

He shudders mentally. Those days after coming back from the circus were the worst. And not for the reason everyone should think.

It wasn't just the cold emptiness, the chillness of the manor, that made him feel like he was walking in some ancient tomb. It wasn't just the gourmet meals and designer clothes designed to make him feel cheap. _Bought._ It was the loneliness.

The loneliness that he would have to embrace. The loneliness he would have to wrap himself in. He went to school, and he made friends. But none of them could be told who Dick Grayson really was.

Funny how all he'd wanted in those days was an older brother. Someone to pat him on the back. Make fun of his hair. Laugh at his puns.

Back then, Bruce was an iceberg. His love was frozen in glances and the occasional embrace, too tight. He didn't know how to let it _flow._

Dick could feel the love. But it always felt cold. He didn't know how to tease, how to curl up in front of a cheesy movie and laugh at how downright bad it was.

Bruce, since then, had melted. Alfred attributed it to Dick's warming influence. But one day, stumbling into Bruce's study, he'd found this goldmine of parenting books. Stacks upon stacks.

Bruce had learned emotions the only way he knew how. 

From instruction manuals.

Jason empties his duffel's contents all over his bedroom: a cozy, warm thing in the attic with sloping ceilings. The comforter which had carried him everywhere, and the hoodie he had worn ten lifetimes out of. Also the pink frock with the red lace, which made him feel pretty. Although he'd outgrown that too. 

He displays it to Dick. Baiting him. 

Dick makes an amused sound, but doesn't say anything else. 

"You like to cross-dress?" 

"So what if I did?" 

"Nothing." Dick shrugs. "Just...you know, figured you for the uber-masculine type."

"It's got nothing to do with masculinity." Jason doesn't know why he showed it to Dick. It felt like a landmine he just _had_ to walk into. Now he's naked. 

"No--I know." Dick sits down on Jason's bed. His cheeks are a high crimson. 

"I just--you're so...comfortable about it, is all," he stammers. "I used to think--I mean I knew in my head, mentally, that it wasn't, but I used to, I mean I just always felt--" 

"What, for godsakes?" 

"Like I was the only one," he spits out, his face beetroot.

Jason bursts out laughing. 

"Whaddoyaknow. The guy in the fluorescent leotards."

"Shut up, twerp. That costume is not by choice, let me tell ya. Not, 's well, _all_ of it. The cape's a no-no, strictly. How many trapeze artists do you know wrapped up in yellow sticky tape?"

"So then why do you dress like Gotham's fricking traffic light?" 

"Why do you guess? Suppose you're a criminal. And you see me heading towards you."

"Uh..."

"Well, let me make this easier for you. It's about what you _don't_ see. After that. Because you're too busy shooting at my glorious self."

The way Dick chirps on about his job, you'd think it was a piece of...cake.

"That's gonna be _my_ job now. Not ending up on the business end of machine guns." Jason says. 

Dick does a double-take. "What. 

"What exactly has Bruce told you?"

Jason had put two and two together: no free lunch. 

"Look kid." Dick leans against the almirah and hangs his head.

"I don't know what you think the deal is. But whatever you think, it's wrong.

"There's no frigging deal.

"You don't have to dance for your supper. Batman didn't adopt you, stupidhead. Bruce did. And you're gonna be his _son_. No ifs, no buts."

"Then what was all that you're-gonna-end-up-as-me-shit?"

Dick looks guilty.

"Yeah, that was me being an asshole, trying to scare away the homeless kid. 'Cause I'm such a frigging hero."

Dick rolls up his sleeves. No track marks. 

"You frigging asshole."

Jason gets up to punch him in the gut. He's fast. But Dick swerves aside with the easy grace of a ballerina.

"Yeah. That's me. And one more thing. I invented my job. Okay? Two years in. One night, after I saw Bruce come back with _six_ rounds lodged in his back and thigh and knee. Some mob had got the drop on him with night goggles. That's when I knew. That Batman needs a Robin. Truth be told, I think I've gotten more fist from the man himself. The first night..."

His eyes drop away, swelling with memory.

"Go on," Jason urges. Dick shakes his head.

"Bruce has a thing. About letting children near danger. That he thought he could break into me.

"The first night, I don't even remember. It was all a haze. All I know is, it felt good. And then...pain.

"After I was back. Bruce grounded me. He tried, at least. I would say I'm as headstrong as him. He discovered it the hard way. I kept following him. Out there. You see, I told myself it was for him. But it wasn't. I couldn't explain it. But I felt like...my destiny was to fly out there. With the stars. By his side. 

"He decided to whip it out of me. Yeah. Those were the days. That second time I followed him, he took me by the ear. With a riding crop in his hand. Out in the carriage house, make me kneel with my shirt off, my back to the wind. Blood, etcetera. Alfred begging him. 'Please master Bruce. Only a child.' And I only laughed. Told him I'd got worse back home from my dad. And that was God's truth.

"He took me to a shrink. Threatened to send me away. Poor guy. Tried everything."

"Then what?"

"Nothing. I took the beatings, I took the meds. I took to the sky every night. And one day, I guess...

"What?"

"I was laid up in bed with the flu. I guess that was when it happened. He comes back from patrol, bone tired. You know how I know? Because he didn't know what he was saying. Cause he asks me, and this is my hand to God, he says--

" 'Where were you?' "

" _Fuck."_ Jason sobs out with laughter.

"Yeah." Dick joins him. "That's when I knew. That we were a frigging team."


	10. Chapter 10

Jason roams the halls when everyone is asleep. The chintzy clock chiming, the stray beams of sunlight sidling in from the gaps in the curtains, the portrait of Bruce's parents hanging heavy in the still house, their eyes boring into its walls.

It feels like home and not-home. He could roam here forever.

Bruce mostly leaves him alone. He notices Jason likes privacy and warmth, so he takes him to the third-floor garden. The blooms are tinted with soft, mellow skylight, the armchairs scattered around the begonias and irises in light slumber.

"You can make this your sitting room, if you want. I'll tell Alfred no one is to disturb you."

So Jason retreats there with a book and a glass of port wine stolen from the library. Life is good. He roams the halls of Valhalla, the farms of Lilliput, the dungeons of Middle-Earth. He sleeps when he wants to. He's summoned for meals with a bell, and he's allowed to bring and eat it upstairs.

The monster curling inside him grows with nourishment. Jason had once read this book, about this spoiled prince who's captured by raiders. He was supposed to become generous and kind by the end of the novel, but the author had inverted the story. The prince had discovered he belonged with the raiders. They didn't make him feel like he needed to earn respect through greatness. Or something like that. 

The moral of the story was most people aren't born in the correct jigsaw puzzle. Sometimes they're pushed into another, and they fit.

Does Jason fit? Is this all he wants? 

Sometimes. 


	11. Chapter 11

_...He who has mastered any law in his private thoughts is master to that extent of all men whose language he speaks..._

_The orator distrusts at first the fitness of his frank confessions, until he finds that he is the complement of his hearers. T_ _hat they drink in his words because he fulfills for them their own natures..._

_The deeper he dives into his privatest, secretest sentiments, he finds, to his wonder, they are the most acceptable, the most publically and universally true. P_ _eople delight in them; the better part of every man feels--this is my music._ _This is myself._

"That was beautiful. Thank you." Jason murmurs, eyes closed, drifting lazily towards the gentle drop of the waterfall. 

"You're welcome, Jason." Bruce closes the book, and getting up, places a light kiss on Jason's thin, pallid cheek. He draws up the bed clothes around him tight and turns off the golden light.

He opens the door and turns around.

"Jason?" 

"Hmm?" Jason lifts his drooping lids.

"You know I love you, right?"

Jason sits up. _Not this again._

"Bruce. I'm not gonna bolt. Okay?

"I'm never gonna bolt."

Bruce's eyes are two shards of cobalt reflecting the light from the dim corridor. 

"Okay."

A muscle twitches in his lip.

"Goodnight." 

The door shuts.


	12. Chapter 12

Jason waits for Bruce to come back from patrol in the living room. He waits for the face of the clock to open every night. He can't sleep until he sees Bruce home safe. He can't sleep...because he hears Dick's words in the back of his mind. _Batman needs a Robin_. And the least he can do for this Robin-less Batman, is stand guard. Even if standing guard would do no good to anyone except himself. 

Bruce doesn't like Jason to go into the BatCave, doesn't even like him peering into it. And Jason respects that, he does. Bruce wants to keep him away from all things Bat is understandable, more than understandable. Bruce himself, a master martial artist, a master strategist, a master detective, a master everything, rarely comes home unscathed. Every night, the poor guy emerges swathed in fresh bandages, and the healing scars of old wounds, still just underneath the surface of his skin. Jason occasionally sees Dick emerge too, both holding each other up. A broken arm, a broken leg. Whatever went on under there, _out there_ , they are careful not to bring to the dining table. Not to bring to the house. But when they think Jason isn't listening, isn't looking, a secret word, a knowing glance, pass between them. Nothing sinister, or insinuating. Just... _it's cold, for September,_ or _the car needs an upgrade_ , or _what is up with Penguin's new costume._ Something about their shared world, their shared universe, the one Jason is excluded from. 

  
And he doesn't hurt. He doesn't. He's not going to force himself into a life that clearly doesn't pay enough dividends to justify...being part of some bigger whole. A bigger heritage. A line of Robins, all protectors of the Protector of Gotham. One family under the moon, running and leaping under a night sky shot through with stars together, a dance of death, of joy, of love, of family. All the wisdom and courage earned with deeds of sacrifice; all the hope and pride seen in the eyes of a father who rejoices in his legacy being honored, although he will never show it. 

And Jason was not a part of that. He was never going to get to be a part of it. Because Bruce. Because one kid had already hurt his wishes by going against them, and Jason was not going to offend him with two. He was not going to give Bruce that, in exchange for everything he's received. Regret. He's not going to make Bruce kneel in a pool of his blood, wishing he had left Jason well enough alone, so that _at least he'd be alive, what have I done, what have I done, I'm a monster._ Jason does not have acrobatic skill, although he's plenty good with a pocket knife, he doubts that would do him any good. And what he has in bluster he lacks in cockiness. He's not confident enough he won't go out there and get himself killed, and then Bruce would cry, and give up being Batman, and Gotham would suffer, and it would all be because of him.

Still, he waits. Every night, outside the clock. For Bruce to enter. Sometimes he would pass his hand lightly over Jason's head like a blessing, sometimes he would smile, like to say _it's good to be home, back to you._

And the nights he doesn't come back? Jason has heard the phrase living hell, and thought people who used it were being melodramatic, because even when he was starving on some forgotten street corner, or warming his shivering hands over a junk fire, he would never have used the phrase living hell to describe himself. There was always some ray around the corner. 

Tossing in covers that alternately felt too heavy and too thin, sweat sheening his back and under his armpits, he would go over the ten worst possibilities like a mantra. Repeating them over and over. He's either dead, or not dead. If he's not dead, he could be either still in action, or in captivity. If he's in captivity, he could be getting tortured, or not. If he's getting tortured...

He's Batman. He's the motherfucking Bat. He walks out of there, that's what he does. That's what he always does, always has done. He's badass. Now stick your head on the pillow and Go. To. Sleep.


	13. Chapter 13

They're running. Running in the corridor of the hospital, lights blinking harshly in their faces. Jason's arm stings from where Dick is twisting it too much, but Dick probably doesn't even notice, because his eyes are smarting with tears, and they're running through a set of double doors, and another set, and through an operating theatre and out, nurses and orderlies shuffling after them with their badges, and Jason screaming 'sorry! sorry!' but Dick's mouth is set stern until finally they turn down another corridor, and it occurs to Jason that Dick really knows his way around this building, and he shouldn't, no one should, until they're banging into a trolley cart ('sorry!') and take a left and another set of double doors, but this time they're in some kind of private ward and its quiet and the air smells different here and the nurses and orderlies aren't shoving them around anymore and Dick lets go of his arm (but it still hurts) because they're standing in front of a hospital bed with white towels and sheets and curtains and beeping monitors and tubes and plastic bags filled with fluids and IV stand and...Bruce.

Bruce is propped up in one of those patterned gown things and his arm is outstretched and needles stuck into his veins like three feet deep and there's a heartbeat monitor that Jason just notices because they only bring those in for serious things, right? When the patient is in a live or die situation and the doctors need to know if he lives or dies?

"Bruce." Dick comes to a complete full stop. 

"How bad is it." he snaps to one doctor, an elderly lady with old-people glasses and an old-people face and an old-people smile, holding a file and looking very brisk and efficient.

"Dick. You shouldn't be in here." She says quiet and almost stern, every part the old prissy schoolteacher.

"HOW BAD IS IT." Dick isn't even screaming. He's quietly taken up all the room with his breathing, but his face says tell me, or I'll shove that file somewhere else and it won't be a better place.

She looks down at her file. "I'll say this in terms you'll understand. Dick. It's partial spinal cord injury. And by partial, I mean complete. From waist down. He'll never walk again."

She says this all nicely in one breath, like she wants the news to hit him hard and wants to be around for the fireworks. Dick sinks to the floor, clutching his stomach in his hands. Vicarious pain, vicarious hurt. 

"Go on, get out of here." Jason tells the good doctor. "Get out," he musters again, when she looks unconvinced with his authority to speak to him that way, and puts the _or else_ into his voice. She walks out, heels incongruously clicking under a shriveled frame.

"All my fault." Dick says it so low under his breath that Jason doesn't even hear him, almost. He rocks with pain. "All my fault. I would have been there, should have been there, but I found the costume too tight and now he's dead, dead--"

"He's not dead, hey." Jason leans down and puts his hand on Dick's shoulder but Dick shrugs it off. "He might a well be!" Dick screams. "He could as well be dead, in fact you know what would be a mercy, that we should kill him before he even awakes and realizes what has happened to him..."

"HEY HEY HEY HEY!!! That's not a thought that's gonna fucking pass your brain you hear me? That his life is not worth living so you'll make the decision for him! Maybe--" and here inspiration strikes Jason--"maybe it's good for him, what if he was going to be dead five years, ten years down the line, but now he'll live forever and ever and atleast he'll be seventy and he'll get to see your grandchildren and mine and even if it's from a wheelchair he'll still be a kick-ass grandfather and they can play hand ball games and chess and..."

Never let it be said Jason was not good at building castles in the air.

Dick doesn't even hear him. Right now, Jason doesn't even exist. All that is there in the room is Bruce. The too-thin face, all planes and angles, the outline of a frame against the gown and ultra-white starched hospital sheets smelling of iodine and aseptic-ness and sterilized-ness and bleach pure white. Why why why did it have to be him, but the answer was already in both boys' minds and they felt all alone, but not alone together. 

"Alfred." Jason says looking up. Dick looks on blankly. 

"Did you tell Alfred?"

"Dick."

"Dick!"

He looks up, his face's lines like they've aged a decade, a century, the lines around his eyes and mouth already darkening with sorrow. He removes his phone from his pocket. 

"Alfred is at home. He doesn't need to see this."

"Doesn't _need_ to see this? You do not--listen to me, you self-righteous know-it-all motherfucker, you do not get to make that decision! That decision for _him_! His only son!"

Dick faces around and raises his hand and Jason's face feels like a brick crashing into a wall. Burning red streams from his nose and onto the spotless linoleum. _What a pity what a shame_. 

" _I'm_ his only son! That's it, you get that? Me! I should have been the only one all along, then Bruce would never have gone looking for you and this never would have happened!"

He's not completely making full sense, but then neither of them are, nothing about this situation is. Jason slumps against the wall, closing in his shoulders against himself and this burning thing in his chest. Again the outsider, always the outsider, he should've known there was always a price to pay, even when they tell you it's all free lunch.

"Yeah," he says and the funny thing is it's not a front, he's agreeing with Dick. It was all over and the coldness of the tide washed over him, the tide that was a bit late in coming but Jason had known all along was coming to take him anyway, like driftwood out to sea again. It was all okay. It was all over. He would set out again and start over, but never stealing tires, because tires would bring back bad memories and chiseled steel and a masked face and hamburgers and _Bruce_.

But there were plenty of other things to steal in the world.

"Hey." Dick's eyes are soft and his mouth lines are softer. "Hey hey hey hey. Don't blank out on me. 'M sorry, didn't know what I was saying."

And it was the truth. 

Didn't matter anymore. 


	14. Chapter 14

Jason goes back to the manor to start packing. And who was he kidding, nothing was his, so might as well start on his life of debauchery by stuffing all the silver he could find into his knap along with his Nike and Vetements and Gosha Rubchinskiy. 

And the odd first edition of Gulliver's. 

He's carrying his loot downstairs looking as offhand as possible when he meets Dick who's coming up the stairs with a crappy paper coffee cup in his hand and his overcoat slung over his shoulder. 

"Leaving?" he asks, but no surprise or delight or anger in his voice. 

"Yeah."

Dick nods. "Good luck."

No _goodbye, baby brother_ , or _see you around_ , or even _do you have any idea where the hell you're going genius?_

Jason bounds down the stairs. There's a strange curiosity floating like a dead fish in his heart. One day he could write a book about this: The Time I Was Adopted By Batman And Other Stories. Dollar bills float in his eyes.

Or maybe he could sell Bruce, to the highest bidder. _Batman's secret identity for sale! Order! Order! Do we have a million? Ah yes, the gentleman over there. Do I hear a counter-offer? Anyone?_

Dick looks down. 

"Might as well return the silverware."

Jason looks up at him. _There are no words._ He has exhausted all the curse words and the swear words and the liquid filth he knows how to spew, and Dick is still standing. With that stupid coffee cup in his hand. Looking for all the world nonchalant like _there's work to be done._

Jason bursts out laughing.

Dick's eyebrows skate to the ceiling but Jason can't stop. _God. Jesus._ Why does it feel like heaven to be in hell, like he can't wait to fall into the earth opening beneath his feet, take me, down down down, give me no rock bottom, hug me to your bosom, dear ground...dust to dust...

His sides are shaking, and he's clutching at them, but he can't help himself, and he sounds like a demented hyena, cackling his head off, but Dick isn't looking sad or pitying or disgusted or anything. He's just looking.

Dick goes down and helps Jason over to the couch. He waits the fit out, smoothing Jason's back with warm hands. When Jason is done streaming tears and snot, he hands him a tissue. 

Five minutes later, he sighs.

"Just so you know, I would never have let you go."

_Whatever. 'course he'd say that now._

"I have been acquainted with the night," says Dick afterwards, with Jason curled up on his lap on the hearth before the searing warmth of the crackling logs.

"I am acquainted, Jason." 

_I have been one acquainted with the night.  
I have walked out in rain -- and back in rain.  
I have outwalked the furthest city light._

_I have looked down the saddest city lane.  
I have passed by the watchman on his beat  
And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain._

_I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet  
When far away an interrupted cry  
Came over houses from another street,_

_But not to call me back or say good-bye;  
And further still at an unearthly height,  
O luminary clock against the sky_

_Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.  
I have been one acquainted with the night._


	15. Chapter 15

Dick and Alfred carry Bruce in from the standing Jaguar as Jason squints down through the shiny window pane. Bruce blinks in the too-strong light of the shrubbery and grass, his legs pieces of pine wood stiff in dark matte trousers, and shoes stuck on his feet like on a wind-up doll. He grimaces as he is set down before the shore of the stately house of his grandfathers, a broken man. 

Jason swallows against the bitterness of his chapped lips, and moves away silently from the window. He moves out of the room, where he can hear Bruce's thick voice burst out through the gap in the landing. 

"Where's Jason?" 

A thin, reedy note pleading with him, and again, louder this time, a voice like whisky laced with a hint of panic, "I want to see him."

Jason peers around the banister. Foam flecks around Bruce's lips, and his stillness is that of a man who is liable to bound out of the chair at any moment like a Jack-in-the-box. 

Jason comes down the stairs measuredly, his feet dragging too far behind his stomach. He stands before the wheelchair with folded hands, eyes skimming the air just above Bruce's head, trying to read a message in the shimmering air. 

Bruce reaches out--one hand cupping Jason's cheek, pillowy fingertips tracing his skin. His hands are rough, but theirs is the roughness of the old wooden stool in the kitchen, a familiar presence. 

"Jason." Bruce's voice creaks. "Nothing lasts forever."

From snippets of conversation he picked up over the feverish weeks, he has put together some pieces. Bruce was going after this gang, which was training children to be pickpockets and thieves. He was lured in to a trap by one of the children and surrounded by literally hundreds of them, armed with glittering daggers. Whoever had set it was counting on Batman being helpless in the face of an army of children, and he had not counted wrong. Bruce didn't raise a finger. Because raising a finger would mean causing pain to a child, whose undernourished frame had only ever known misery and pain.

And so, he'd lay in the blood of a thousand little knives sticking into his wounds, a thousand little cuts, until excited by the blood and the lust they had gone full Lord of the Flies and had stomped and stamped on his lying frame, and he had sputtered and coughed, but never moved, not even a finger, to defend himself. 

Jason knows what it would feel like to be in that...herd. If Bruce had not... _saved_ him, all it would have taken is a single wrong turn in his life, and he would have been there, stamping and stomping with the rest of them. He would have done it because everyone was doing it, and it was the only thing he knew how to do.

He didn't know who to feel more sorry for. 

But they had left him alive. They had left him with air in his lungs, and maybe one shriveled, starved conscience, one tiny being, had seen the collapsed, tattered form move one finger, just a little crook, and leaned down to put his ear to the whispering mouth, the air gently brushing his earlobe--and heard--

"Remember...

"You're better than this. You'll _always_ be better than this."

Because even lying there, even lying in the crimson shards of his bones, Bruce would be thinking of others. Of other lives, tiny memories too little, far too young, to be tainted with breaking him like this. 


	16. Chapter 16

"So now what."

Dick trains with an absent-minded ferocity. His body is on auto-alert; he eats sleeps breaths with a regularity of motion that belies--or perhaps betrays?--the tumult of roiling emotions within. Bruce watches over him, as eagle-eyed and scrutinizing as Dick is absent. Jason has a funny notion--really, too funny, but he must not utter it--he cannot--but has he? Would he? _Has_ Bruce taken over Dick's body?

A serious question requiring serious answers. He doesn't doubt that mind swapping might be more accessible than science fiction novels are to Bruce. The question is, _would he?_

And how does Jason feel about that?

It doesn't take an idiot to realize that Dick is on the warpath.

Children seem to be a weak nerve all over the family, Jason notes, from Alfred's tight white lip as he asks what cold, cruel enemy had wrought this work, only for his imagination to be pushed into a hell's world of juvenile monsters all clamoring for a piece of his son, all of them survivors, whose worst crime was to _survive_. The butler polishes every available surface of the house with punishing thoroughness, until the house gleams bright with an unnatural, all the more because worked-for, sheen. 

"We need to find who orchestrated them. Bruce. You in a wheelchair can probably figure this out a lot faster, without patrol weighing you down. I can go wherever you want to, be an extension of _you._ This may be a blessing in disguise," Dick ends inanely. 

Jason clenches his fist convulsively. You would think having a disabled girlfriend would have introduced a hint of sensitivity in the acrobat, but _noop_. Maybe someone should try putting the hyperactive _prick_ into a wheelchair and telling _him_ it was a blessing in disguise, he thinks bitterly, forgetting how similar his sentiments in the hospital had been.

Bruce takes this stoically. He has work to do. Work is always a good distraction. Praise God for work, Alfred mutters. Praise God.

Jason remembers the time he and Bruce had gone to the Gotham registar for the adoption. Jason tactfully suggested that he wanted to retain his good old name. 

"Wayne stinks."

Bruce nodded solemnly with mixed feelings. On one hand he was relieved, and grateful. Dick hadn't chosen to either. Jason doing so might produce...fireworks. 

But on the other hand, he couldn't conceal from himself a small drop of disappointment. 

"Full name," the drone in the typical-clerk reading-glasses on her witch nose intoned.

"Todd. Jason Todd."

Behind Jason, Bruce grimaced in pain. 

The clerk looked up. She took pleasure in teaching these MI6 upstarts a lesson. There were _some_ perks to her job. 

"Very well."

And after a few formalities, Jason had walked out of the office with an adoption certificate clutched tightly in his sweaty palms. Bruce had wanted to check that all the details were in order, but after he signed the bottom of the document, Jason immediately snatched it away, and clutched it. It was _his_.

After they sat in a diner opposite, Bruce looked on in half-innocent amusement as Jason inspected the certificate, horror dawning on his face.

Jason's full name was now officially Todd-Jason Todd. 


	17. Chapter 17

Bruce wheels in to the Gotham Clocktower, where a monster was rumoured to roam the gigantic dial room. A monster so terrifying most ran helter-skelter up-down stairs tripping and tumbling over their overalls.

The City authorities were embarrassed to admit that their city's watchtower was haunted. Maybe it was a sense of civic pride, but everyone could imagine the faces of those bastard Metropolis WASPy accountants as they opened their Daily Planet with the front page screaming Good Old Gotham Does It Again: Ghosts in Clocktower, and their fleshy mouths spreading in glee. _Count on Gotham to Do Ghostbusters._ Because one vampire and a gazillion gargoyles weren't enough, apparently. 

So they kept maintenence workers out, but miraculously the clock kept working. It was a win-win for the city and ghost: a red-haired girl in a wheelchair with a nasty laugh.

"Hey, Barb."

Barbara squeaks and jumps out of her chair. Bruce has mastered the art of the inconspicuous roll-up. Of course the scare toxin doesn't affect him. His one pleasure in life (besides the singing in the shower) is making people jump. And it is still available to him, much to his delight.

Barbara lands immediately in her wheelchair like a cartoon character who realizes she shouldn't be able to do something and then promptly loses the ability to do it.

"Bruce. You asshat."

Bruce rolls up beside her, peering at the coruscating data streams and shaking his head. Barbara was busy hacking into LexCorp tech's mainframes and leaving them little 'gifts'. Last month it was a pseudo-bomb alert in their primary chemical factory. She had enjoyed that one. Lex Luthor's scalp was going grey due to the mysterious cyber-terrorist. She had enjoyed that better.

"I have work for you. _Actual work._ " He pronounces in as much disdain as you can muster when you need a favor from someone.

Barbara had had a short but supremely edifying superhero career. It was put to a stop when her father caught her sneaking out one night through the ventilation shaft. Her protestations that she was busy scaring rats in a Halloween costume were quickly shit on. Her father wrote an angry letter to Batman, and packed her away to a Swiss finishing school.

Dick tried to rescue her once or twice. She made it clear she was in no need of rescue by hosing him down the Alps. _(Those were the good days.)_

And then there had been the time her father had been kidnapped by the Clown Prince of Crime. Barbara avenged his brutal vicarious torture. The infectious laugh was her trophy.

(The wheelchair was almost certainly psychosomatic. 'Deep-rooted anxiety and helplessness as a result of a despotic paternal figure' said the psych eval. Bruce tried not to figure out too much _which_ one.)

So here she sat, bane of despotic tyrannies and secret service black-sites across the world: a little girl in bunny-ear slippers and iridescent pajamas, a little smudge of chocolate on her lower lip.

"I _am._ Working." She pouted. (She was almost certainly not.)

"Okay."

He rolled up to her further, and stared at her desktops and consoles. 

" _Queen Industries?"_ Bruce tries to choke back his righteous indignation and fury. He is not succeeding.

"And what, may I ask, is not supporting the local economy worth to you?"

"The look on your face," she answers unperturbed. "And I'd hardly call Wayne Enterprises _local._ " She bites another chuck off her bar and grimaces. Bruce isn't sure if the grimace was aimed at him or the chocolate.

"I have some news for you," he says, and indicates his... _state_ with a flourish.

"My condolences."

"Thank you."

He rolls back, and props his arms on the squishy material of his armrest. 

"There were about two hundred of them," he says softly.

Barbara turns around to the monitors. Emotions are not her specialty.

"I'm sorry," she says mechanically. Bruce nods in her peripheral vision, clearly hearing the sympathy that is not there in her voice.

They are both a little emotionally stunted that way.

She gently reaches around and pats him on the back. 

"Barb. I didn't come here for the support therapy. Although that's a nice bonus."

"I know why you came here." She hands him a file. "Happy birthday."

"It's not my birthday." He takes it from her anyway.

"This is to make up for the label-maker I got you inadvertently. It was meant for my dad."

Bruce looks at her suspiciously. But Barbara pleads innocence with her doll eyes. _Look at us,_ her eyes say. _Would we ever lie to you?_

"Fine," he grunts. He opens the file. A face stares out at him. Bruce's skin tightens around his face. 

"So you know her."

Bruce makes a small sound in his throat and closes the file. Barbara peers at him, curiosity piqued. But Bruce is giving nothing away. 

"Thank you," he says again, his voice taut, his eyes unreadable.

"You already thanked me," she whispers softly.

He nods, and shoves the file in a docket under his chair. When she turns around, he brushes her temple with his lips.

When she turns back shocked, he is gone. 


	18. Chapter 18

Commissioner Gordon is having a bad day. 

Well, a day descernibly badder than the rest.

First of all, Robin shows up. He's gotten shorter. 

He whispers _don't tell Batman I'm here, or else I'll shove that belt so far up your ass it'll come out of your mouth._ Then he hides behind the Bat signal. 

Then Batman emerges out of the deathly gloom that blankets the GCPD headquarters. 

He's all _wrong._

First of all, he's gotten shorter too. What the hell is happening to his damn city? 

Secondly, he's carrying a flask. A flask. Seeing such a mundane item in the hands of a man rumored to be no less than shadow and smoke increases the feeling of _wrongness._

Jim is about to protest that he's having none of this nonsense, none of it, when Batman undoes the swirly cap on the thermos and takes a long, noisy swig. 

And then belches. 

It's a good belch, loud and strong. Jim's hair is blown back, and in his disgust he forgets to look intimidatingly angry, and ends up looks faintly nauseous. 

"Sorry," says the not-Batman, in a voice laced more with husky seduction than menace. He doesn't sound sorry at all. 

Apparently realizing his lack of manners, Batman offers Jim the flask. "Care for a swig?" 

Jim does not. He has had enough. The murders in Peyton Place of the harridan dowager, presumably by one or all of her maids, and the hardly unexpected finding of her ransacked jewels, could wait. He has to sort out these boys first.

(Yes, he's calling them boys.)

"Where's your father?" he asks, with a becoming amount of officiousness. 

"What are you talking about?" _What gave it away?_

Dick decides playing it safe is safe. 

Jim draws out his piece. _Woah there._

"Unless you tell me where the real Batman is, you and your accomplice can very kindly _piss off_ my roof." He's not even joking.Firing a few rounds into this clown is going to feel good.

Fine, it's not. But it's still the _right_ thing to do, isn't it? Police dignity is going to count for something in this town, as long as Jim Gordon is alive. 

But Dick is now on the scent. A faint smell of too much mouthwash, and Bruce's Clinique. 

_JASON!!!!_

_Fuck!_

"Where is he?" Dick grits out, in true Batmanian fashion, glaring across the roof in his X-Ray vision. 

There's no one there. 

"Sorry, Commish. Gotta go," he tosses lightly behind him. "I'll get someone else on the case." He jumps off with a light grace, and instead of melting into the wind, somersaults off a few trees and pylons. Jim stares after him, heart thudding. A small part of it whispers _be safe._

"Alfred. Activate Jason's tracker."

"Yes, Master Richard."

"Master Dick is cool."

Rumor on the street is the Bat is broken. 

Now in any other city, once learning their greatest foe was down the criminal underworld would go out to celebrate, preferably in some elaborately antisocial fashion. 

Not Gotham. 

Rejoicing the Bat is down in his own town is a hell-no, given that many of his choicest enemies are his greatest fans.

"He _what?"_

 _"Now_ what."

"We die to death of boredom, is what."

"I can't even think of a joke, much less a punchline. Really, was killing people always this humorless?" 

Killer Croc bursts into tears. He'd set his heart on and made it his life's mission to taste bat-sushi. Now he was probably going to eke out the rest of his miserable existence, and die sushi-less. 

Poison Ivy comforts him. "The world is full of many flowers. Why drown your heart in the nectar of just one?" 

But Croc is comfortless. 

This was a turn of events only made drabber by the fact that none of them could figure out which one of them had done it. 

Not that any of them trusted any of the others when they protested that it had not been them. 

(Wisely. Whoever it was would incur the wrath of the rest, for the rest of their--prematurely shortened--existence.)

This problem keeps them occupied. Which is good. For Gotham.

Bad for whoever _had_ done it. 


	19. Chapter 19

Dick rushes home. Bruce is in the underworld, click-clacking away on the keyboard.

The twerp had rushed back home when he realized his discovery was imminent. Dick finds him in the swimming-pool, with two neighbourhood girls, one tucked under each wrist.

"Heya, Dick!" Jason calls cheerfully. "He's my ugly brother," he stage-whispers to the two giggling delights. They flutter their lashes at the angry hunk. The increasing rage etching into his face and pouring into his popping muscles is clearly not a turn off for either of them.

"Send the girls home," Dick thunders. " _NOW_."

However the girls are made of sterner stuff. This fresh display of rage only acts as a further aphrodisiac to the two (and to Jason, it must be admitted,who is finding this convenient time to realize he is bi. And might be attracted to Dick.) The awkward timing of this epiphany is of some concern to Jason, since right now Dick does not look like any amorous feelings or awkward boners on Jason's part were going to melt him.

Dick manages to herd the horny twosome out. He turns to Jason. 

Jason looks a mix of unrepentant and apprehensive.

"Did you think I was going to--hit you?" Dick whispers softly.

Jason stands still, chewing his lip. 

"Jason." Dick's voice is soft. He sits down on the recliner, and pinches his nose-a gesture he has picked up from Bruce. "Believe me, I would be whipping the hell out of you now. 

"If I thought it would do you any good."

He takes a deep breath. "Robin is...something. Something not good. For the person who wears it."

He holds out his hand. 

"I need to show you something."

Jason knows what he wants to show him. The Wall of Horrors, it was called. Every bruise, every injury, every fracture, every gaping wound. Meticulously photographed and documented (probably by Alfred--the poor man). It served as a bringer-to-Earth of starstruck kids, wannabe Robins. 

But it also served as a reminder. To the heroes. 

_Look at what has been taken from you. Look at what they tried to rip from you. Everything. And look--you're still here._

"I've seen it." Jason says. "I've seen the goddamn wall, and in my dreams. I've seen it, and I still put on the costume. You know why? Because Bruce's sacrifice has to _mean_ something!" 

Dick's face is very straight. 

"Bruce is a warning."

"He's your goddamn father! He's Batman! He _always_ gets up! He gets up because that's what he _does!"_

Jason's eyes say what his words won't. 

_Because that's what I need him to do._

Dick's heart, already made of sugar and spice, finds a reason to melt. 

Bruce looks on from a shadowed corner, a glaze in his eyes.

It hadn't taken Bruce broken. It was Bruce whole.

The Bruce who had awoken Jason and in the middle of the night led him to an alley. The Bruce of yesteryear. Cold, like the very earth under Gotham, leeching its warmth.

He'd held Jason. And Jason's heart had bled.

Till now, Jason doesn't know if it was a dream. If he was making it up. Because he wanted some part of Batman to want _him._

The way it had wanted Dick.

_Where were you?_

I am here. 

Waiting. 

Batman watches from the shadows, as his boys look into each other with new, wary eyes. 

Theirs is not going to be an easy journey. Boy does he know. 

Bruce rolls back down. His bed is made, and now all that is left to him is to lie in it. 


	20. Chapter 20

Selina Kyle, orphan.

Selina Kyle, runaway orphan.

Selina Kyle, runaway orphan cat-burglar. 

Selina Kyle, runaway orphan cat-burglar mother-to-be.

Selina Kyle.

Mother.

It was a beautiful baby. It was a beautiful day. The world's fitful starts and stops had left Selina sleepless, shaken to the core. She craved some rest, and to hold a warm body in her arms. To fondle beautiful feet, and coo.

It was taken from her. 

Like all things Catwoman had ever had, her daughter had been ripped from her very arms, precious and sweet.

She had not made a single sound. She gently passed into a floating sleep, where no reverie, no monsters could touch her babyhood. And never woke up.

Selina Kyle screamed.

* * *

"Bruce knows.

"Who it is.

"Who is responsible.

"Alfred.

"Help me. 

"Help me find out who it is."

Alfred's decorum is unimpeachable. And today is no different.

"If Master Bruce has chosen not to share it with you, perhaps it is not meant to be shared."

The Dick of yesterday would have exploded. But Dick has been practicing the art of maturity and self-control. He masters himself.

"Very well, Alfred."

But while withdrawing, he can't help it. He bends back and says, slowly and with excruciating clearness, four words that were never heard in the Wayne household before. four words, that if mentioned in front of anyone, would cause jaws to drop and eyes to bulge out of their sockets. Four words worse than any curse invoked on anyone's head, or any slur on anyone's grandmother.

"Your cucumber sandwiches suck."

He ducks out. Alfred stands, for the first time and last time in his life, with his mouth open, in shock. 

He didn't think Master Richard had it in him.

But then, nobody did.

* * *

Yes, it was Selina Kyle who had shattered the bat.

After the Curse of the Cat had taken her only daughter, Selina had resolved never again to let her mercy triumph her sense of what must be done.

She would make the world a better place. The only way she knew how.

The only way she had been raised.

Children like Jason, who'd starved and scrounged, she would make powerful. Girls like Holly and herself, forced into the flesh trade, she would make vicious. No one would exploit them. No one would tell them what to do.

No one would save them.

They would save themselves.

Bruce knew, and with this knowledge came a deep grief. Like the yearning for his lost parents, came a yearning for another, different world, where precious innocences would be kept like delicate china, preserved forever in satin, never let go of.

He had let go of Selina Kyle. And now he was nothing to her.

He was sure that she had not given the order. But she had not balked when she learned what had been done. By her urchins, in streets she owned. 

She was a mother now. Nothing else. And if Bruce had laid hands on one of her children, he would have been burned alive in his bed by now. But he hadn't. And he'd made it out.

Bruce grieves for Selina. But he also grieves for himself. He grieves for Jason. He grieves for Dick, forced into another suit too tight for him, choking the life out of him.

He grieves for the whole damn world.


	21. Chapter 21

Jason Todd, newly sixteen, sits hunched over the city of graveyards and gargoyles, alleys and asylums, as it is flatteringly described. He knows he is supposed to prowling with majestic energy, exercising his newly found freedom of muscle and swinging his legs over jutting drain pipes and feeling...Robin. All over.

Instead, he feels a bone-deep ennui.

This is what he had wanted. But something was missing.

Of course, he knew what said something was. His mentor languished in a cave, surrounded by monitors, dull light cascading over his face. The seasons came and went, eons changed, civilizations rose and fell, and Bruce was still sitting there, silently smacking his lips, solving crime after crime, his head now lolling, now raising itself, now gulping the cold brew he called coffee, now turning it down, drowning in the syrupy sweetness of a life of lethargy and potatohood.

Bruce was miserable. Jason couldn't be happy. 

Sure, he went skydiving, and maintained his upper-body strength. But half of Bruce's life had been bleached out with his atrophying muscles. 

Even those. There was nothing he could do but watch them waste away. All the physio-therapy in the world couldn't avail. _What a pity what a waste._ All those years of hard work and Himalayan training, in barren deserts and equally arid frozen frosts. His legs, how much they meant to him now! He who had never underappreciated them before. Now they were his life, and his life was wasting away before his eyes.

All this, of course, Jason read in the occasional glance, the experimental thigh touch. He, Bruce, who had never believed in miracles, was now reduced to silently checking for one. Cruel universe. 

Jason raged, but in his heart, he'd heard of a solution. Or read of one. 

When he mentioned the idea to DickBat, the look on his face told Jason all he needed to know.

It was a supremely, extraordinarily, exorbitantly, inanely, immeasurably, infinitely bad idea. 

So Jason decides to try it.

* * *

Dick knew. He did nothing. Selina Kyle had been left well enough alone. Her gang of theives were well-fed, well-covered, well-looked after. What more could the Bat want? Really, what more could anybody want? She had taken an immovable object, and turned it into an unstoppable force.

Her children grazed the edge of humanity, and yet they lived by a code. A code of chivalry; honor among theives. They distribute spoils equitably; the weaker always getting more. They look out for each other. They look out for their way of life.

Selina is proud.

And the days she remembers the cost, she reminds herself of her labor, and the life it produced. There was no victory without a hint of defeat. Bruce's labor--labor of love, a small part of her whispered--had brought her, Selina Kyle, life.

And she was going to make the best of Bruce's sacrifice. 

* * *

"Fuck you."

Jason stands in a grimy Gotham alley. The air here is oppressive, the dust grim. There is a storm approaching. It's in the electric smell of the air, the crack of tree leaves. But here, in the notorious East End, where Mama Fortuna sits in judgement, the air feels like it's already rained. Time feels...fleet of foot. Like a glimpse into the future.

Jason doesn't like this glimpse, which is a testament to how much he has changed. 

"The boy from the house on the hill." Selina purrs. "Here to pass righteous judgement. On the rest of us."

Jason shivers slightly. The mission he has come on is dangerous. And what if...he had calculated wrong? He needed to survive. What if she has acquired a taste for Bats? 

As if sensing his subdermal apprehension, Selina smiles, a sharp, feral rasp of lips across teeth. 

"You were once an alley rat. Your eyes are still too clever, too shifty. The eyes of a rat. You know, I _used_ to say bats were simply rats with wings. I was wrong.

"Bruce doesn't know how to be a rat. He's never been one his entire life. He was always playing dress-up."

Anger sizzles through Jason like a forest fire through a dark, dry wood . His skin sizzles. He can barely meet her eyes.

"You don't know me, lady. You've never known me. We're not fit to breathe the same air."

This stirs Selina. Such stark...humility from a Robin was unheard of. 

"I'm here to ask a favor. Something you owe to the man you loved. The man you broke. The man you left shattered, the man who forgave you.

"I need you to break someone out."

Selina Kyle's eyes bore through Jason's. As if reading the resolve there, she frowns, a small crease between her delicate lids. 

"That man will be the death of you, Jason Todd."

"What, just because you have the fashion sense of a witch now means you're...what, some kind of seer?"

The woman embarrasses him. But Jason also feels a sense of unease. Maybe he should have headed the warnings. The crows tearing apart the eagle in the sky. The dogs keening, all across Gotham. People feeling something was terribly wrong, and not knowing what it was, wrapping their shawls and their children's overcoats tighter around their bodies.

The woman laughs. 

"A mother's eyesight," she whispers, sibilant. Her tongue juts across her teeth. There is the distinct impression of a snake tasting the air with it's fork.

"I have it now. Losing my own, I gained hundreds of others. Their destinies, their fortunes. Tainted by the pollution of a crime not their own. A hell not earned.

"I know, for example, that the taste of a cat clings to your palate."

Jason doesn't want to touch the air around her. Is it his imagination, or does he hear a baby's laugh?

"Just give me what I want."

"It is yours." Her hair, grown long and thick around her shoulders, seems to emanate a smell Jason recognizes. The smell of a lifetime. Of _his_ lifetime.

"Will I get what I want?"

Selina's face grows tranquil. "Yes." Her voice is very far away. "Yes, Jason.

"But what you want comes attached to a burden. Too heavy for one person to bear. And yet, one person will bear it. For the rest of his life."

Jason escapes. He shivers. He wants to be gone. Tonight, his last night. Bruce's last night. He will do something normal. Something...good.

Tomorrow, the Clown would be unleashed upon Gotham. 

And Jason's destiny would unfurl. 


	22. The Birth of the Clown

Ra's Al Ghul had long seen the future as his friend.

His Detective. His responsibility. His ward.

It would simply not do, to have him lose his edge. Blunt his magnificent will straining against enemies unfit.

So he created for him the perfect monster. Frankenstein's monster.

The Detective, as usual, was unappreciative. But Ra's took a grim, wistful pleasure in knowing his will was done.

The Clown had not disappointed. 

No, he had not disappointed at all.

* * *

The Pit was rumored to give everlasting life. At a price. 

For each person, the price was different. 

For Jack Napier, the price was family. The Pit had a power, to snatch away what you held most dear. What made your life worth living. And then to give you that life, gift-wrapped.

In other words, it had a sense of humor.

Jack Napier found the Pit uproarious. He'd wanted to keep it all to himself. So he covered it, after he crawled out and licked his wounds.

Jason did not think the price was so heavy to bear. He had studied the ancient texts warning of the curse. 

_What would I give for you?_

_Everything._

We're Batman and Robin. 


	23. Chapter 23

Dick sleeps like a newborn, with a trust in his environment that betrays a lifetime of having a roof over his head.

So when Jason chloroforms him, Dick doesn't so much as twitch. 

A pang. Jason leans over, breathing in Dick's scent. Musky rose.

He kisses him, once, experimentally. Then feels ashamed and withdraws. But not before leaving him a note. 

_I had to believe it was worth it._

Dick, in his grey sweatshirt, his crow's nest of hair, his streaked cheeks.

Not bad for a last memory. Not bad at all.

* * *

Alfred was next.

Jason had taken the precaution of drugging the old man's tea. After all, he had been in the secret service since before Bruce wore diapers. Jason would not trust he could be snuck up on.

Then Bruce. 

Bruce was awake when Jason walked in, all intent, a panther. 

One look at Jason, and he knew something was very, very wrong. 

He reached beside his bed, and pressed the alarm that led to the security mainframe of the Bat-cave. It would send alerts throughout the house. Dick. Alfred.

Jason stood. Waiting. 

That's when Bruce realized no one was coming. 

"Jason.

"What did you do."

Jason looks at his father. In that moment, he wants to place his soul in Bruce's lap, and ask for forgiveness. He wants to touch his father's stubble. He wants to ask if he has been a good son. 

"What I had to."

"You didn't have to do anything, Jason."

Jason's eyes are older than their years, by far. Bruce has a sudden incongruous flashback to another set of eyes, an age ago. He shakes this off. 

"Yes, I did, Bruce. 

"Batman needs a Robin. 

" _You_ are Batman. _I'm_ Robin."

"Jason." Bruce's voice is a gravel husk. "What did you do."

Jason shrugs. 

"Oh, nothing much. 

"Just a deal with the devil."

He rushes forward. Bruce raises his hand, and sprays Jason with a tear gas cannister hidden under his bed. But Jason laughs. The mist settles in his skin, harmless droplets. 

"Give yourself some credit. You _really_ think I wouldn't have thought of everything?"

Jason chloroforms Bruce. He shrugs him over his shoulders and stumbles off into the dark tapestry of the night. 


	24. Chapter 24

_Crunch crunch crunch_

Boots sluicing the gravel all around me. A smell pungent rises out of me, the aroma of fire and smoke rise from all around me. I have surrendered. A voice comes to me, rising out of the largesse of my soul and the wraiths of sand and time. Of Invictus, the Unconquerable. The voice tells me, sing. You are, today, noble.

Today is the day I was born for. 

Out of the night that covers me, black as the Pit from pole to pole,

I thank whatever gods may be for my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance I have not winced nor cried aloud,

Under the bludgeonings of chance my head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears looms but the horror of the shade,

And yet the menace of the years finds, and shall find me, unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate, How charged with punishments the scroll,

I am the master of my fate:

I am the captain of my soul.

The land of the Queen of Sheba, Bruce had sung paens of this place in my heart. The birthplace of humanity, the birthplace of the world's first riddle: before even the Sphinx's puzzles:

_What is life?_

What was so important about Ethiopia? Now I knew. 

In the heart of his heart, Bruce knew it to be the place of my demise.

_What I am afraid for, Jason, is your dark and slender soul._

_It seeks a cause to die for._

My father knew me well. The horror of his eyes, blue liquid sorrow pouring out of him, _Jason Jason Jason_

And the Joker, for once in his life, stilled out of his distracted, desperate laughter, staring out of his hollow core. At me, as I pushed the man I was sworn to protect into the Pits of Hell's Bowels. To be reborn, or die trying. 

He would be reborn. This I know.

But the Clown's face twists, his red jaws opening like an envelope, his laugh twitching and scornful.

"I want to be around, Jay-boy.

"I want to be around for whatever comes out of that pit."

And his eyes are egg white with red veins bursting out of their sockets, and I don't know why, but my stomach twists out from under me. I don't know why, but a blanket of despair lands over me. I can't move, my legs are worming into frozen sand. My hands are flailing above me, as my torso anchors itself firmly into my early grave. But my head and chest are above ground. Surely, this is good?

One day later, I am wishing the Earth had swallowed me up. Because I had expected the clown. I had thought the curse, _Bruce's curse,_ the price he had to pay would be paid through me. A thousand deaths I would take, but the Pit was insidious, and it _knew._ What we could take, father and son. Death was not one of our demons.

And the Demon's Pit had earned it's name.

After I dove back into the splintering light of consciousness and opened my eyes. The Clown is sitting, yawning on the precipice, his legs dangling off it.

And I see a crowbar. It's glinting the desert sun off it's metallic heat. I see the arm clutching it, delicately, almost experimentally. It's clad in black leather gauntlet. I follow it's gaze up, and see a mask, and a stiff suit. Standing. My heart leaps out. 

" _Bruce!_

_"Man!_

_"_ You almost scared me.

"Help me out, man. It worked! I can't believe it fucking worked!

"And we're _both here._

 _"_ So much for the curse, huh?"

The Clown chuckles. Bruce kneels down. 

He lifts the crowbar. 

The Clown gets louder. 

_Crunch._


	25. Chapter 25

It feels like drowning.

One moment there was staggering light, mushrooms of fire beating against my brain. I stagger against the oceans, the panorama of clouds opening up before me, blue yellow white ribbons dancing in the rising air. The sky is a floodlight. The light is playing tricks on me. The Pit has sent up a monster in place of my father. But deep in my jawbones ( _crunch_ ) I know the touch hit home. 

Failure feels like medicine you're forced into swallowing by the spoonful. It tastes of bitter memories rising on your palate which you hastily bite down against. Blood against blood. 

My arms are dangling against my will in the sussurating air. My head feels a different kind of pain. It's pulsing and bleating from the inside out. Nice time for a headache. 

_I sit beside the fire and think of how the world will be_   
_when winter comes without a spring that I shall ever see._

I've bolted the door and locked myself in with my fate. The iron clamps tighter around my lungs. Breathing is beating back with every inhale the shrouding layer of heat getting denser and denser, like syrup in my lungs. 

Death is lying against a green dumpster with the scampering of rodent feet nearby, seeing the swollen black rat with rotted pink feet and eyes of clay looking into me saying _welcome_

And all the time I clutch onto my family. But the rat is patient, and I am letting go.

_But all the while I sit and think of times there were before,_   
_I listen for returning feet and voices at the door._

There are no returning feet at the door. My eyes close.


	26. Chapter 26

_"His name was Nightwing._

_"He alone saw the fate of Krypton before everyone else saw it destroying itself._

_"He was never too late._

_"He couldn't save it anyway. He tried._

_"I guess the reason my father told me the story was for the times I was lost under the surface of hopelessness. Remember Nightwing."_

_"Because he_ couldn't _save your home planet. What is this, another lesson in fatalism?"_

_"No. It's acceptance. Not a flaw to accept what you couldn't conquer, what you couldn't control. Even if you could see it coming."_

Dick throws himself off the parapet, limbs twisting and slicing all the way through. The ground shatters with a crash. But Dick keeps going. It's an eternity of a ride to hell. You're never there.

Jason's presence beats back against him, a physical thing. There's too much of Jason. He's drowning in Jason. He's breathing in Jason. He's living Jason in his bones.

Jason's uncombed hair, his too-loud breakfast laugh. His dreamy eyes as Bruce read him a story. The way he arched when Dick stroked his back. His huff of pain when someone else would have been shouting, screaming _too much_.

_Jason._

"I don't even know his favorite flower." 

Dick weeps for the littlest things. Like how he doesn't even know what to put over Jason's grave, what he would _like_. 

The Batwing rolled into the hangar. Alfred and Dick have been sitting on different ledges of despair. They both spring up with alacrity.

And Batman walks out with Jason's body cradling his arms. Bent and broken like a red twig. There's blue streak marks across Jason's torn shoulders. Dick's breath shudders in his throat.

And Bruce?

He hasn't taken off his cowl since.

It was the Joker.

The HAHA painted across Jason's suit, right across the torso. The red paint which is almost certainly not.

"I don't remember a thing." Bruce's voice is rough gravel ripping apart his throat. "I don't remember!" and he sweeps his workplace aside and sinks to his knees.

When he had stood up, still drowsy from the pit, Joker was standing over Jason's prostrate, dripping form, crowbar clutched in palms convulsive with shaky laughter. He looked over at the Bat, and his laugh got harder, mean and more menacing.

Waves of sickening despair lurched over Bruce. He threw his weight over Joker, and dragged him by his hair (green strands in black leather) while Joker laughed harder and harder, like he knew the funniest joke in the world. 

_Jason Jason Jay-_

His hands weren't his own, and so neither were his actions. He didn't know what he did, but he wiped the grin of Joker's face. 

And left him in a sandstorm.

Then he picked Jason's body up and got on the plane back home.

Bruce left behind himself all the parts of him he had brought there.

All the parts except pain.

He's battered every night by scraps and pieces of--of _experience_ , there's no other word for it: a limp doll in his arm, a shattered image, the feel of something cold and metal and heavy, despair and self-loathing pull him down into their filthy, turbulent currents, there's nothing, there's no one, _mine mine mine my boy my beautiful boy my beautiful son dead dead dead.._

And he's holding down two bodies keeping their weight from crushing into his chest and he's sobbing and choking with the blood and the filthy rage and the neon lights flicker in the alabaster moonlight, and why did he have to be so afraid, why couldn't he have held on, why couldn't he have dug into the armrests and gritted his teeth and stayed? Then they would still have been here, not be dead...

Bruce starts and wakes up. Sweat snakes down his temples and into the small of his back and he shivers. He sits up and blinks at the fuzzy blue screen, and reaches for his hot chocolate. Riddler's new hideout wasn't going to find itself. He pushes Jason to the back of his head, there for his bones to be shattered and and his brains splattered all over again, over and over.

Forever.


	27. Chapter 27

What is grief?

Months pass by like streaks across the sky, leaving no trail behind except a faint memory of light. Bruce and Dick hold each other up, their arms wrapped around each other tighter and tighter. There's no one else, there can't afford to be anyone else. But now you won't see the old, glorious bounce in their steps, the wild joy in their piercing hunter's gaze. They no longer come alive in that single, crystal-keen moment of stillness before the slice of a knife through the air, the ringing of a thug's jaw by impact with a fist. They're no longer Batman and Robin.

Dick dons black, for the first time in his life. His symbol is simple: two wings.

"Nightwing." Bruce suggests instinctively after looking at him. A dark avatar, all shadow and no shape, all flight and no soul. 

Dick's eyes widen for a moment. _Nightwing._ The word brings back some haunted memory. Clark, standing light years away, in a hidden palace of crystal, softly enunciating the words bringing alive the story of the old Kryptonian hero who had gone down with the ship he could not save. 

Yes. Dick, the old Dick least, has gone down with Jason. The costume would be a testament, even in face of victory, to the one victory he would never have. He would honor the Last Robin by wearing his mourning in every battle he fought again. 

"Nightwing," he says, forming the word with his lips. 

It's everything Dick wants to be.

* * *

_Sometimes there's so much beauty in the world. I feel like I can't take it, and my heart is just going to cave in._

Timothy Jackson Drake remembers the last time his heart caved in. It was when he saw a beautiful bird fall, and then rise again.

The bird was beautiful, because it danced through life, just like that plastic bag. Nothing could wound it. It flew like the wind was carrying it up and around and away, like it was so easy, like it weighed nothing, less than nothing.

Tim followed the bird's career, and some days, like Ricky Fitts, he felt all of Gotham was in love with the bird right along with him. The joy that emanates from his every backflip, every slice through the air. Tim practices at home, but he can't grasp and replicate that perfection. It was something native, something only Dick Grayson has.

And now, his bird is gone. 

There's someone else in his place. Someone...not exactly ugly, because no matter who he became, Dick Grayson would never, _could never_ be ugly. It was just...ungentle. Someone sad and harsh and arrogant and defiant and reckless and...all cutting edges and snark. Sometimes, when Batman wasn't around, Tim sees Dick remove something forbidden from it's holster in his utility pouch, the one supposed to contain his dinner.

A gun. It's a Smith and Wesson 60, and looks like it's well- cared for, but seen better times. Tim would wager anything that it's the same gun that once offed a certain billionaire and his wife in front of their son.

Dick pockets it almost immediately, and looks around. Sniffing something wrong in the air. He has an excellent sense of smell. But Tim has learned this long ago, and always masks his scent. 

Finally, after several minutes, Dick settles down on one of Gotham's granite sentries, and frowns and sighs, then withdraws the gun again. It doesn't seem to be loaded. He just seems to enjoy the look of it, the feel of it in his palm, maybe the feeling that he's being a Very Bad Boy when Daddy isn't around.

The gun was to be Tim's undoing.

While he watches, Dick bites into his ham-and-cheese, legs carelessly dangling off of the edge of a spire, one hand playing with the rounds chamber, rotating the metal drum experimentally. Tim is on the rooftop, leaning straight down, with a safety harness around his belt. Over the years, he's gotten as savvy at navigating Gotham's giddying heights as the famous pair. Now he feels more at home in the bracing mountain wind crouching under the gloomy gargoyle faces than he does at home. Sometimes he thinks they sense him, but he is just that side of too slow, and he slips away. Once he had a rather narrow call, and learned not to wash his clothes with strongly scented detergents.

Now, Tim yawns. Dick seems to be in a rather contemplative frame of mind lately, his restless fingers the only part of him moving. Tim leans back and considers unwrapping his own lunch, timing his bites with Dick's so he wouldn't be heard.

Then, the thing happens. Dick finishes his lunch and tucks the film wrap into his belt, then stands up with intent written in the firm poise of his body. He seems to be prepping for launch. Tim hunches over the storm drain for extra cover, just in case Dick decides to look up. The only visible part is the reflective glare of a lens, in which one could see the stormy wisps of clouds moving in from the sea and the dark skeleton outlines of Gotham's famous skyline, as they might be drawn by a macabre impressionist.

Casually, Dick's hand reaches into his pouch. It would be the most innocent of movements, but in the next few moments, Tim has cried out, his own voice to him the voice of a stranger, an unfamiliar husk 

_"NO!"_

Because Dick had withdrawn bullets from the creaking leather-tight suit, and popping open the cylinder, had pushed one, _just one,_ into a chamber, and closed it. Then he had raised the gun.

And put it in his mouth. 


	28. Chapter 28

Time slows down exactly when Tim needs it to speed up. Vaguely, he remembers Dick's stillness that is scarier than any startled scrambling. Vaguely does he register his idol's face turn to the source of the voice, and he tries to scamper away in soft-soled sneakers, only to realize his feet have melted into pools of abject custard onto the garish concrete. 

He has lived this moment so many times he's lost count, both in his dreams (nightmares) as well as real-life what-if scenarios. Countless lifetimes of horror and cold-blooded fascination course through him as his body detaches itself and hovers from a safe, objective distance and watches the rest unfold like a melodrama at which it has the best seats in the house but is no more invested in than any other member of the audience.

Dick turns. He tucks away the gun, and slowly, collectedly, stands up and whistles. Three piercing notes. Tchaikovsky's overture? Negan? _Shit shit shit_ _guy has a gun and is clearly at the end of his rope and_ fuck. 

"Come out." His voice is soft pillow, inviting. Like they're playing hide-and-go-seek.

Tim tries to move the puddles, but they won't budge. He slowly peeks his head out. Their eyes meet. Surprisingly, there is no thunder or lightening. The city's noise and movements below continue like there's no cosmic drama unfolding here.

Dick's blue eyes laced with gold meet Tim's flat discs of streaky grey sky. Dick's eyelashes are clumped together with wetness like dew. 

Tim raises his hands, white palms outwards, as he tries to stand. His pulse must be bursting out of his neck. He wonders if Dick sees that, or notices the dank sweaty hair standing out at all angles, or the sleep-stranger eyes with the shadows under them, or the chalky skin. He wonders what Dick sees.

Dick must see a hollow of a boy. A wannabe, a clumsy clunky basement-geek of a stalker. Thank God he's not pimply or spectacled. Neither of those would help his case right now.

"Hi," he tries weakly.

His wire is dangling out from under his red shirt. Dick takes one glance, and springing up onto the thick marble ledge, he strides across like a panther. He sits on his haunches and raises Tim's shirt (bare skin shuddering) and pulls out the wire and the recorder connected. Blue veins stick out between his eyes. His jaw mucles clench and twinge. He doesn't look at Tim again at all, not to know, not to intimidate, not to read the dilation of his irises. The graze of his wet kevlar gloves feel to Tim like an alien's tentacles, for all the warmth in their touch, all the humanity. 

Franky, Tim would have faced Batman instead. Batman would've probably treat Tim like some kind of poor outcast vomited up by suburbia. He might have taken him for ice-cream and let him off with a strict warning. With Dick, Tim would be lucky if he got pushed off the ledge into the snaky streets below. The one thing Tim has learned is this: Dick is hella protective of his family. Tim once saw Dick when he was the Batman stand-in reprove the Robin stand-in, the guy with the white streak in his hair, for _jaywalking._

"To the crosswalk, Robin." He had said, before they both doubled over with laughter. Laughter so heavy and bright, it stung Tim. He wanted to sob. 

This recollection brings Tim to the present moment. The present where he is again on the verge of tears, but for an entirely different reason.

Dick has plugged in the earphones and is listening away to Tim's audio diaries, eyes scowling. He's clearly trying to assess level of security risk. If Tim knows anything about Bat paranoia (and he does) he'd say his score is through the roof. 

He convulsively clutches his baggy pants. _Thou shalt not wet thyself._

* * *

_Nothing more dreary than snowfall in winter._

_How is it that Gotham snow is grey before it ever touches the ground?_

\----fast forward----

_Uhhhmmm. Coming down with something._

_ACCHHHOO!_

\---fast forward---

_Wonder why I never remember to wear clean underwear. My asscrack is killing me._

" _Jesus!_ " Dick pulls the noodly earphones out of his ears in disgust. "Why would you feel like recording this?"

"I just record anything. Anything that comes to my mind. Just to keep me busy. You know, listening to your voice helps. With the loneliness, and things like that." The answer turns out sadder than Tim wanted it to be. He clears his throat nervously and peers down at his soles, which he does by inverting each foot until the shoe soles face each other. His sneakers never align properly. One's a millimeter too short.

Dick is still frowning. He's clutching the old-fashioned tape recorder as if it is a lifeline to who Tim really is. Apparently he's feeling decidedly ambiguous about taking the boy to Bruce; Tim is guessing Dick isn't too hot on the idea of Bruce finding out his son was toying with the idea of blowing his brains out with a family heirloom.

"Alright listen."

Tim looks up. 

"I'm not gonna condescend to you and call you kid. Clearly you're very smart, and very, uh...determined. But whatever your deal is--and I don't wanna know what it is-- (for Tim here had opened his mouth) you're gonna bury it. Understood? No ifs, no buts. You're intelligent enough that I don't have to make any threats. You go home. Get a good night's sleep. Forget about this, any of this. Follow me again, and we'll...I don't need to spell it out for you. You know the drill."

Tim swallows against this. Dick is already turning around, and _no no no._ This is not how it's going to be. Not if he can help it.

"Dick."

Dick's head swivels around faster than a rotating office chair. His eyes have darkened, like the clouds of an approaching storm. He's worried. Tim has learned to tease emotions from faces shielded through years of buildup of stoic facial muscle by watching Batman.

"Look. I promise on my mother I'm not gonna hurt you. I've been following you everywhere, Dick. I know all about you, and yet I've never hurt you, _once._ I'been keeping track of you off and on for _years_ now. You're like family to me. I couldn't imagine what my life would be without you."

But Dick is advancing. His arms are pulsing with diluted rage, knotted like corded fists. His eyes are of a man who has seen everything he has to lose burn to ashes, and so now can enjoy the freedom that comes of being without fear, and without remorse. Tim stumbles backwards, his eyes already tracking Dick's movements while scanning the roof for escape routes. The one exit, the roof, is blocked off by Dick's Goliath. What would be his odds if he backflipped off of the roof and tried the old grappling wire thingy?

There's just one catch: Timothy Jackson Drake is afraid of heights. Although no one would know it by looking at him, dangling and shuffling along mile-high ledges. However, diving off one is another order of thing.

Tim decides to appeal to the hero's nobler sentiments.

"I have a cat." He bites out. He's figured Dick for a cat person.

"Please. Who's going to take care of it when I'm gone? Not my parents." Tim laughs, bitter scorn trickling into his voice. "Not anyone."

Dick stops, and stares about him like a man in a dream. He looks down at his fisted hands. He looks up, into Tim's increasingly desperate face.

"You think I'm about to hit you."

"Well. The evidence would seem to be pointing in that direction."

Dick falls to his knees. His pants scrape the ground _,_ hiding the scratching breath biting it's way out of his throat.

"What's your name." He asks hollowly.

"Tim."

"Well, Tim." Here Dick takes a long, shuddering breath and doesn't say anything for five minutes. Tim plays with the pebbles on the roof. He kicks them around from one spot to another, then back to the starting spot.

"How long have you been following me?" 

"Five years." 

"That's. A hell of a long time."

"Yeah."

"Your parents, I'm guessing, don't know."

"Nopes."

"And don't care."

Tim is silent at that. 

"What's the name of your cat?"

"Hm?"

"Your cat."

"Oh. Marie." It is the first name that pops to mind.

Dick looks at Tim. Then Tim realizes. _Shit._

"You don't have a cat, do you."

Tim lowers his eyes. 

"Why did you say that name."

"It just rolled off my tongue."

"What's _your_ mother's name?"

"Janet."

"Hrm."

They play with pebbles a little while longer, tossing them around with long fingers while the moon's shadow lengthens and makes ordinary objects seem eerie and ghost-like, and extraordinary objects seem real.

"I wish I could stay here forever. With you." Tim blurts out, then looks red in the face.

 _What the ever-living_ fuck _did you say that for, you overgrown pastry weasel?_

But Dick only throws back his head and laughs. It's deep and joyous, and the laughter crinkles the sorrow lines and makes Tim's chest ache with a secret fist squeezing down on his heart. 

Well, not so secret anymore. 

"You have a crush on me," Dick guffaws, but rolls up his laughter when he sees Tim's acute misery.

"Well...who wouldn't?"

Dick is still chuckling softly, but at this question, he drops silent. 

"Me?" he says after a while, softly. "I let my brother walk into his death. Literally. My headstrong, idiotic, dork of a brother who you would have really gotten along with...and he was kind, and gentle, and loved cats, and..."

There's a suspicious sound coming from the back of his throat. Then the floodgates open.

He begins to cry. Thick, gut-wrenching sobs producing milky tears, the sound tearing apart Tim's fibers. Tim's world seems intent on tearing apart and soldering itself back together in all the shapes he has never imagined. He always...he never...he's just...

Dick. Like this. In front of _him._ A Bat. Trained to take extremes of heat and cold, brutality and torture, with only so much as a grunt. Something must be broken deep down for the software to stop working like this. 

Tim shyly shifts closer to the only person he has in his world, the only person he's ever _needed._ He gently rubs his back in concentric circles. He doesn't have a compass, but he's pretty sure the circles are equidistant at all points on their circumference from the...

_Shut up you little weirdo._

Tim melts into Dick's arms, rather than the other way around. He puts his arms around the boy--the man, who he knew so much, and clearly knew so little. 

Dick shrieks with his sobs, and Tim is there, and he cries like a little baby, and Tim is there, and he rolls himself up into a little ball, and Tim is there, and he falls asleep still curled up like the world's biggest fetus.

And Tim is there. 


	29. Chapter 29

After this melodramatic embrace under the moon, there is nowhere to go but down. 

Tim invites Dick back to his apartment to show him his wall, but Dick hems and haws and finds some reason to disappear. Tim shrinks under the scrutiny of his stomach, trying to bury the voice at the back of his head whispering _you think_ _you're_ _worth_ his _time and attention? Hahahahahaha, gosh darn you're so funny, I've got tears streaming out of my nose, jeezus that's a good one, tell me another._

Tim tries to shake himself out of this slump of self-pity. Dick is dealing with a sadness that is beyond Tim, _bigger_ than him. Bigger than anything in his power to fix or heal or listen the hell out of and make disappear. So Tim drags himself back, except now there's nothing to look forward to, nothing to get up for anymore. Why couldn't he have been like others? Simple and pre-packaged normalcy, where even if you don't have anybody to love you, you can still hide under the comforting reassurance that you did everything right, so there must be something wrong with someone else...

From childhood's hour I have not been  
As others were; I have not seen  
As others saw; I could not bring  
My passions from a common spring.  
From the same source I have not taken  
My sorrow; I could not awaken  
My heart to joy at the same tone;  
And all I loved, I loved alone. 

He is alone. He's pushed the world away and the world isn't pushing back anymore. His own parents don't push back. They took off for Tanzania four months ago; their last phone call was three weeks back--his mother reminding him to mulch the cactus. _Mom, cacti don't need mulch!_

Tim runs through the night, the air slicing under his arms and tickling his eardrums. He doesn't he doesn't know where he's heading and he couldn't care less. He passes large Martian crane hands and the Gotham bridge suspended quietly in the night, and the smelly wharves. His hair waves like seaweed in the fishy air, and he keeps jumping, rooftop to rooftop, crunch to crunch, he's sprained his ankle, he's bruised his toe, but he keeps going, he doesn't want it to end, to stop, because if it does he's going to scream, and he's never going to stop screaming.

* * *

"A love letter?"

Alfred holds up a simple eggshell white envelope with a messy scrawl in blue ink. _Jason's scrawl_. "Indeed. I believe Master Jason was carrying on a rather old-fashioned correspondence with a young lady." 

Dick sputters, then coughs when they turn to look at him. Only Jason would do this. _Only Jason._

The scrawl is neatly aligned, if messy. _Miss Stephanie Brown, 411 Lenox Ave_.

Bruce handles the letter, flipping it over and over lovingly in his fingers. The envelope is soft and creamy but not too feminine, just a nod in the direction of elegance. He takes a deep breath before he reaches for the knife to slice it open. Dick puts his hand over Bruce's. 

"I'll get it to her," he says gently. 

"We don't know what's in it. Could be a security risk." Bruce is stubbornly refusing to let go.

Dick wants to slap Bruce on the back of the head. But he knows what Bruce wants. To hear his son's voice one more time. This is the last part of Jason in their lives.

"We'll ask her to read it to us. If she wants to." Dick says.

* * *

411 Lenox Avenue turns out to be a large, spindly three-storey house with jicksaw scrollwork around the cornices, standing off the road partially hidden by a clump of trees. Dick rings the doorbell. His index finger quivers slightly. He hopes Bruce doesn't notice.

The door is opened by a cheerful-looking mopheaded blonde wrapped in a woolen comforter, with a coffee mug in her hand the size of her head.

"Hey. We're..."

"Bruce Wayne." Bruce says, moving ahead and offering his hand firmly.

The blonde squints at him without accepting his hand. 

"Haven't I seen you somewhere before?" she asks, shading her face against the sun.

Bruce decides to try again. "Bruce _Wayne_."

The blonde blinks. Bruce waits for the lightening to strike. And waits.

Dick is enjoying this tremendously. Finally, he pushes Bruce aside. 

"Hey. Dick Grayson." He smiles rakishly, holding out his hand. The girl has not been born yet who could resist his charm when he did manage to turn it on. Out of the corner, he can see Bruce rolling his eyes. 

The girl grins back. She has nice hair. She takes his hand and shakes it. Her palms are clammy.

"Sorry. didn't get out of bed until two. So, what can I do for you?"

Bruce withdraws the letter from his black jacket and hands it to Dick. 

"Are you Stephanie Brown?"

"Yeah. Omigod. Are you from the million bucks lottery thingy?" Stephanie's pale purple eyes enlarge, and she reaches down to squeeze her stomach.

"No, we're not from the million bucks. You knew Jason Todd?"

For the first time, Stephanie shrinks from the light of the doorway into the dark beyond.

"Yeah." She says warily. Her face has collected dust and shadow from inside the house. Dick and Bruce look at each other.

"May we come inside?" Bruce asks politely, his cap in his hands.

Stephanie leads them inside. She puts her coffee mug down on the glass chimneypiece and draws her blanket around herself tightly. Her delicate hands are shivering, although it's probably eighty degrees inside the house. There is a light girl touch everywhere, from the garden-green walls and rosewood floorboards to the chintz curtains flying in the open breeze. 

She invites them to sit down on the couch. Bruce and Dick follow her like two nervous rabbits, sensing their role in this play and not enjoying it one bit. They sit down like stiff statues, unconsciously mirroring each other's saturnine pose.

Stephanie looks like she might be eighteen, although there is a confidence about her, a worldliness, that is older. Her cheeks are alive with an earthly glow. 

"I want to tell you--"

"We're here to say--"

They both stop short, tripping over each other. 

"Maybe we should start with the envelope?" Stephanie suggests, a bit flustered. 

"Jason is dead." Dick blurts out. Bruce lifts an eyebrow. They had agreed beforehand to...soften the blow.

But the blow couldn't be softened. Jason was dead. There was no way around that stark, simple truth. The shorter it was said, the better. How close were they? Now Dick would find out.

"What?"

"He had a terrible car accident," Bruce says, moving his lips to the sound in his ears, but otherwise feeling no more connected to the voice coming out of his own body.

Stephanie blinks. "And _you_ are?"

Bruce leans forward and pierces her with a glance. "Exactly how much has Jason told you about us, Miss Brown?"

"Nothing! I don't even know who you are--" she stutters, and covers her lips. 

"We're his father and brother." Dick says shortly. This house is holding him down and forcing him to swallow regurgitated cud he was already done swallowing, and just wants to get out.

"Adopted. Jason was on the streets until he was twelve." Bruce says in his clipped, steel tone.

"Yes, he told me that..." Stephanie suddenly doubles over, clutching her stomach. Her blanket slips from on her shoulders and pools onto the floor. She pukes between her legs. Both Dick and Bruce spring forward to hold her, then they start. Because there, under her gossamer nightgown in the place of her stomach, lies a big bulge the size of a melon, ripe and round and pink.

* * *

Stephanie takes five minutes to calm down. Bruce holds smelling salts under her nose when she faints. Dick makes her a mint drink with crushed ice, and makes her sip it, tipping her head backwards gently on the couch and smoothing her back down in soothing circles like he had once done for Jason.

He brushes that thought from his mind. Stephanie is hysterical and must be attended to.

"How did it happen?" she asks after a while.

The official story was an overspeeding drunk driver crashed into Jason's car on the Gotham Main Highway, and plunged his car into a watery grave. The body was recovered by motor boats. Bruce and Dick have repeated the story so many times, it's almost painfully worn out by the time they'd finished. Warm water. Glove compartment. Jason. Screams. Air bubbles. Down down down.

Of course, he was underage too. So there was the fallout from that to deal with. Bruce had been an irresponsible ward, and Dick was even offered an emancipation form. He kept it in his side drawer, and used it to threaten Bruce whenever the older man was being stubbornly intractable about something.

"He broke up with me, the bastard. Told me--fed me some story, some bullshit line about how I could never be part of his life and how it was _too dangerous_ and how he was tired-- _he was tired!--_ all the time, and how he didn't want to lie to me anymore, and nine hundred other freaking towers of bosh! Like he was Alex Fucking Rider!"

"So you never told him about the baby," Bruce says, examining her.

Stephanie turns around. Her baby bump, swollen and unmistakable, quivers with her unvoiced sobs. 

_The baby_ , Dick whispers. Bruce nods, and puts a warm hand on Stephanie's shoulder. 

"It's okay. It's understandable."

"Jason never told me anything about you guys, I swear,, or I would have come and told--"

"Hey hey hey," Dick interrupts. "It's alright." Stephanie sits up, golden filigree hair flying in all directions

"But why didn't he mention something? He could have!"

"Maybe he didn't feel comfortable, yeah? Being the adopted kid of a billionaire is kind of a turn off for some people." Dick says, as soothing as he can muster.

"You're a billionaire?" she turns to look at Bruce.

Bruce looks up from examining the carpet. His eyes are dull sandpaper. He looks like he's bleeding behind his eyeballs. 

"Yeah," he says dully. 

"Much good did it do me," he says after a while. This outburst is so uncharacteristic of him Dick does a double-take and checks his ears for blockage.

But Stephanie responds well to the self-deprecation. She looks at Bruce shyly. 

"We met when Jay was still jacking tires. I was never about the money! But maybe, I dunno--he felt, for whatever reason--but I can't understand! Why wouldn't he-" her tears fall from her eyelashes. She tosses her hair back, and sinks into the cushions.

"He didn't say anything about you either." Bruce observes quietly. Stephanie doesn't hear him. She goes on, spinning her hands in the air, weaving invisible threads around her fingers.

"My dad--he's in prison for a job, okay? And we didn't always have good times. Let's just say the bad times were more than the good. And I needed to work too. And Jay...he was the best part of my day. He used to waltz in, everyday, and everyday demand the same thing." She laughs, a surprisingly throaty sound out of a slender ivory column. "Hazelnut affogato with nuts and cold cream. Guy had impeccable taste, even if he _was_ making a hole in his pocket. Until I started putting it on the house, I guess." She giggles. "And he used to sit and eat it with this silly little grimace, and I kept waiting for him to ask me out, until one day I dump this cold latte on his neck and twist his ear and make him take me to the nearest taco joint." 

"Sounds like some story," Dick says warmly. 

Her eyes glaze over.

"What's that?" she says. pointing to the letter.

Bruce offers it to her. His head is spinning. So much of Jason, _too much_. It feels like talking to his widow.

Stephanie rips open the letter with an impatience that seems typical of her about everything.

Five minutes later, she has again melted into sobs. Bruce and Dick, armed with tissues, tend to her as midwives.

Later, she stands up tottering.

"Careful," they chorus. She beams at them, and in that moment, Dick sees what this ethereal beauty held for Jason. Her smile looks and feels realer to him than all the smiles in the world. (Except Barbara's)

"Where're my manners?" she coos. "Let me get you both some tea!" and she dances off to the kitchen, baby bump in hand. They look at each other. Each of them is wondering the same thing.

_What now?_

* * *

_Steph._

_If you're reading this, I'm dead._

_Don't ask me the how or wherefore. There's so much I haven't told you, Steph. So much I haven't done with you._

_All I know is, something bad is coming for me, or I'm heading for it. My death is written in the stars. I've read it, and I know. Don't ask my family any questions. They'll be burdened as it is._

_But look at me, assuming I can just run back to you, and you'll take me back. Like you always do._

_I've taken you for granted. I'm sorry._

_You're the most beautiful girl on Earth. I think you know that._

_You're funny, and you're naughty, and you're smart, and God_ _you're sexy._

_And I don't deserve you, Steph. I've never been very good with words. You're so much better with them. You could always articulate how you felt perfectly._

_All I feel right now when I think of you is this deep sense of wrongness. Of remorse, I guess._ _I don't want remorse to be the last emotion I have towards you. I want you to know, if I had lived, I would have wanted to treat you better. Treat you different. Maybe there's a world out there, where I do. Alfred says (he's a friend of mine) that everything ends in every way it has to. If I die, there's some world out there where I live. If I've treated you shitty (and God knows I have) then there's some place out there where you're the queen of my world like you are here, but you know it._

 _And I remember, and I'm carrying my memories with me._ _I remember feeling like we’d fused together; like my body was your body. Like I was you and you were me._ _I remember that I didn’t see what we were doing as sex, or fucking, or making love, like none of those labels applied anymore._

_I remember that for a brief snatch of time we weren’t two people anymore. We were two halves of an unsplittable atom, and I didn’t know anymore where I ended and you began. In that single moment I remember feeling like I could have merged with you, if such a thing was possible._

_That if it was possible…I would have done it._

_Anyway, I hope this letter reaches you. I'm leaving it in careful hands. They mess up, and they're paranoid. But they'll make sure this letter reaches you. Of that I'm sure. I've never been surer of anything._

_Goodbye, Steph._

_All I want, if there is a heaven, is to dance there with you. Forever._

_P.S. there's this poem, and I'm aware you're not illiterate and you probably know it already. But I love it, and I really wanted someone to read it after I was gone and think about me, and now I can only see it as being you._

_Do not stand at my grave and weep;  
I am not there. I do not sleep.  
I am a thousand winds that blow.  
I am the diamond glints on snow.  
I am the sunlight on ripened grain.  
I am the gentle autumn rain.  
When you awaken in the morning's hush  
I am the swift uplifting rush  
Of quiet birds in circled flight.  
I am the soft stars that shine at night.  
Do not stand at my grave and cry;  
I am not there.  
I did not die._

_I mean it, Steph. Go on. Do something, own something. You're the king of the world. Just remember me, okay? Sometimes._


	30. Chapter 30

Rich, dark air snaking into my nostrils. Cold blooded fever running through my veins. Outside, I hear _drip drip drip,_ like something shattering my coffin. The loud, heavy drops smack the pavement, or the grass, sinking into the soil and waking me up, _drip drip drip,_ down into rotten floors and drowning staircases. Something is rotting, I could swear it. I look under my armpits, but the smell isn't coming from there. It's coming from the ground. Eagles and snakes coil all around me, pecking at my heart. I want to scream, but I just can't find the words. _Help me_ would be too precise. I start shaking, and rumbling, and rattling, and suddenly I'm lifted up into the night into great talons curving around my spine, great heavy talons, and the wind and the snow and the rain whip my tailbone and my flesh and my pulse, rattling and turning, turning the pegs, until they open me up like a giant bed.

I sit up, and I can swear it's over. It was just a dream.

I am done. I am so fucking done with this life. Hiding under coverlets, soft and damp and dizzy, waiting for the next nightmare to come knocking on my door. I want to end this, I want _finis_. 

I want my son back.

* * *

Alfred Pennyworth remembers a life without nightmares and guilt. A life before a life, when he had lived peacefully and quietly among the seagulls and the sharks, helping to bring in whatever carcasses made it to the shore. He was the seaweed, drifting in and out of sanity, in and out of warm bars and hot taverns, soft moans and softer flesh. A time before a time. 

And then he had faced the guilt and the seashore, and decided to make something of his life. Starting from tomorrow. 

And the day next.

There he was sitting, wrapped in a tartan jacket, all snowy eyes and gleaming teeth. Women went for him, just like men went for sharks. He had one in common. 

And _she_ had walked in.

"What are you looking for?" he had asked her, without waiting to stop himself. And she looked over at him, and his eyes froze. She was the chilly nook, the punishing scorn he had run from all his life. 

They had made love, tonight. And more nights. Some nights were hot, some nights were cold. All were peaceful.

"I want to move here with you," she said.

"I want to move here with you and live forever."

"I never believed in fairytales before I met you," he answered. 

But of course, there had been a reason for that. The woman went back, to her jewels and cars and stretches of lawn green grass.

And Alfred was left alone in the noonday sun, hot on his baking back. 

"I will follow you," he told the wind. "I will follow you to the ends of the Earth."

And he followed her. And she died, and gave birth to a son. Not in that order. 

"My beautiful baby boy," she said one day, cooing at Alfred. "If I will love you, will you take care of me?"

Alfred, the notorious charlatan, said no. "I am in love," he said. 

"I am in love with that fine baby boy."

" _That?_ " she said, crinkling up her nose in annoyance. "But what is that for you?"

"My soul," he said simply.

"He is not yours," Martha Wayne said, holding her head up and smiling. _Such a pretty boy, but really, such a dull head._

But Alfred was gone away, swept away by the simple currents of dreams and worlds he saw in the little bundle of affection. The baby seemed to like Alfred. Even before it was born, which was in a very short while. 

Alfred held his helpless master in his arms, his eyes roving over his face. The very first time.

"I shall name you Bruce," he said simply.

And he was fucking Martha, so she agreed.

* * *

Some things stay forever. Other things leap off a page once they're done. 

Martha Wayne was not to Alfred but a passing memory. But to Bruce's fixation, she was a living legend. He held her in his arms, and after they were gone together, he stood with eyes glued to the ceiling, where he saw the small of her back.

"My father was a good man," Bruce had said, on the day they interred the dead. But when it came time to put his mother's living legend to memory and rest, his song faltered.

"My mother..."

Alfred collected it for him. He had printed, on plain sheets of paper, small, neat, coagulated sheets, what Bruce was to say about his mother. But Bruce brushed it aside, and winced like at a sore. He stood up, his dusty shoes planted tall and firm.

"My mother is a good woman."

 _She is most decidedly not_ , Alfred thought wickedly. But he kept his perfidious thoughts to himself. 

Martha Wayne had become an _is._

* * *

Now Alfred is afraid Jason Todd has begun his beatification in the Church of the Bat. 

He catches Bruce talks to himself, small murmurings. Emotional scorns and slights, things he had never told Jason when he was live. How Jason kept his toothbrush, the state of his hair, why he never took a second piece of toast.

Alfred would be afraid, if he did not know just how very, very wrong it all was. He himself would like to talk to talk to Master Jason on evenings, once in a while. Perhaps he can ask Master Bruce to share his gift for remembrance.

"Suppose, Master Dick, that Master Bruce were broken now, but in a different way. How might Master Jason feel, to know all his sacrifice has all been for nought?"

"I don't think Jason saw it as a sacrifice. He did what he had to because he had been told by the universal soul, or some such thing."

"You think Master Jason belonged to the Cult of the Self?"

"Well, he certainly didn't belong to the Cult of Others," Dick answers bitterly.

Now Alfred knows who he can count on. 

No one but himself.

* * *

Timothy Jackson Drake is caught. For the second time. He's sneaking into the kitchen garden from the lawn.

This time, he's flung into a shrubbery like an insect. 

"Master Bruce. Perhaps you should know you have a stalker."

Tim is brought into the front parlor for judgement before the Lord of the House.

"How do you do?" asks the Lord. 

"Very well, thank you, sir." Tim's ear smarts from where the butler has been re-enacting the days of fish hooks.

"What were you doing in my shrubbery?"

"I was thrown there, your Lordship. By, I hesitate to say, for my ear still feels the smart of his wicked pinch, your own butler, Your Lordship."

"Hrrmph! Alfred, what is this? The boy claims he was put there forcibly! By you!"

Alfred has seen better days. He groans like a soul in torment. Bruce looks alarmed and the makeshift court is broken up. Alfred's every mutter and groan was taken as a portent of forthcoming demise, and thus alleviated with every balm and ointment known to heaven or earth.

Alfred may have known this power he was able to exert. He may have been exerting it on purpose in this particular instance.

"Might I suggest, my Lord, that the boy be put in the dungeon, or be used as a stick in the game of fetch played with the guard dogs, who are always hungry (poor things), while my ailment is looked after?"

The Lord considers this. 

"A reasonable suggestion," he declaims, after what appears to be much serious consideration. 

Tim is dragged away to the doghouse by two minions, while his screams and shouts fall on the deaf ears of the battened portraits of the house.

* * *

"The boy is British Secret Service," says Alfred. "They all have these regulation crew cuts."

"Sort of defeats the purpose, doesn't it Alf?" says Dick.

"Indeed. That's why they invented James Bond. To stay in business."

"How do you know of this?" asks Dick awed.

Alfred looks mysterious. "A sailor hears of everything."

This conversation is carried out in the stables, in front of the new stable boy, who is cleaning out the stalls chock full of horseshit, and who insists tearfully that his _real_ name is Tim Drake and he lives next door and he wants to go home.

"Haha," says Dick. "You can give it all up now."

"Indeed. Your cover has been blown."

They play it a little further. Then Tim cocks a finger gun, and putting it in his mouth, fires it.

Alfred, aghast, and feeling slightly guilty, tells the boy to immediately climb out of his dungarees and 'go on home, now, there's a good chap'. But the boy doesn't move. 

He is looking with the fascination of Frankenstein's Bride and a creepy stiletto of a smile on his face at Dick Grayson.

Who has gone white. 


	31. Chapter 31

The Pit is pure temptation. Ra's al Ghul's life is to lead people to the Pit. The Pit, in return, gave him a child. A baby girl. What was he to do with a _girl?_

But the Pit, in its twisted wisdom, saw fit to give him the crooked instead of the straight. 

He called it-- _her--_ Talia. Talia al Ghul. Follower of the Demon.

Her destiny was etched in stone and written in wormwood. From now to forever. A follower. 

Thou shalt not seek any other path, though many paths shall seek you. 

And Ra's, in his own way, loves his daughter. That is why he asks only excellence from her. Nothing else. 

The strong live. The weak die. It had been the law, before people changed it. It culled humanity, made each succeeding generation braver and mightier than the previous one. 

(And also crueller. But cruelty is...strength.)

And then, what was to happen, before his daughter, his beloved, was complete, was perfect, but for her to fall in love? 

It was to be expected. Women are weak. They were formed from the severed tailbone of man, as the Prophet had said. Their fate it was to be bent, and to bend. But he had always hoped Talia would have been...somehow _above_ that. On level with him _._

But it was not to be. 

Ra's gives orders. The man is to be dead by sundown. He has a tent on the edge of the oasis, unmarked by any crest or symbol. He has foolishly trusted the Daughter of the Demon. Now he would be taught that only naughty children played with fire. 

They come back, all forty assassins. They raise the flap of the tent and slink in, like wounded hyenas. Then they stand respectfully and bow to the Head. But when asked if their mission was a success, they all silently open their mouths. 

Each one of them has had his tongue cut out.

There is a strange, primal symbol carved into their chests with the pointed end of a sizzling weapon, seared into their flesh.

The symbol of a bat. 

Ra's smiles. He should have known his daughter better, should have trusted that she would fulfill her destiny, _her_ way. And her way is the way of Woman. She had been trying to provide him with an heir, what was rightfully his. 

And her choice of a mate has been simply _impeccable._

Talia al Ghul, as it turns out, has no such noble intentions. Her sole desire right now is to get righteously fucked. And she _is_. Very, very well.

"I don't even know you," Bruce grunts between thrusts, sweat dripping from his eyelids, his hands palming her roughly against the wall. 

"You know my father. He's the one who tried to kill you."

"Yes yes yes. But I don't know _you._ "

Talia turns around, and bites into Bruce's nipples. Bruce gives a sharp groan, throwing his head back. It almost rises into a howl.

 _She gets me,_ Bruce thinks, at the same time that Talia thinks _I wish he got me._

"I _am_ my father," she says later, when they're wiping themselves off and pulling up zippers. Bruce looks at her.

"No you are not." She raises a protest but he silences her with a kiss.

"And one day, Talia, you will see."

She does not enjoy his tone. He takes the attitude of a worldly-wise person with her simply because she has been at the oasis all her life. He is almost as deprecating of her as her father.

When he escorts her to the door, she sneaks into her sleeve his used condom.

"Goodnight, beloved." She reaches up on tiptoe and plants a chaste kiss on his lips. They twist wryly. His eyes bore into her like he wants to say something, but he ultimately decides better of it.

He kisses her instead. "Goodnight."

* * *

Tim is suffering. He doesn't know what he wants. All he knows is Dick is the way to get it. 

Dick is also suffering. Tim knows this. He never wanted it. But after he got here, Dick has been shoving him under the mattress, where he would never have to see him again. Denial is an effective strategy against pain and loss, not so effective when what you're trying to hide and ignore is living, breathing pale flesh.

Dick understands insctictively what Tim needs, what Tim wants. He seems to have that gift: everywhere he goes, he can turn the light of the room on or off. He subtly manipulates moods and shifts in sentiment, like a pianist playing at the chords of a million hearts with poised, feverish fingers, to get what he wants. 

"He's a friend."

"How come I've never heard of him?" 

"You don't hear of _all_ my friends, okay?" 

Bruce removes his reading glasses and stares at Dick. 

"Okay, fine. Maybe you do. But this one's...he's...different." Here Dick blushes furiously and turns away slightly, making sure to let Bruce see his reddened cheek. 

_And...snap._

"Dick. You know I'm not homophobic, right? Just because I'm conservative?" 

Dick turns around. "What? _No._ I mean, I would never think that of you, but..."

Bruce holds up his hand. "You're good. Dick, you're better than good. But honestly, this charade is over. As long as he's not too young for you, or you too young for him, it's none of my business. My house is your house. Now don't insult me by asking any more permission."

So Dick installs Tim in his bedroom. The kid looks awed, and maybe a little guilty, which is good. Guilt is good. _Booyah!_

The entire house feels to Tim like December. Pale blue, pale rose, pale aubergine. Whoever made this house, designed the paint of this place was a delicate, sensitive soul. Not a risktaker, but had an exquisite sense of taste.

Tim has a feeling it's not Bruce's mother. The woman in the painting is lantern-jawed, with a fierce, tropical head of hair and blue gleaming eyes. Masterful at rest. His father pales by comparison in the background. Even the wallflowers outshine him.

_Got you._

Tim has been to the house several times. But this time is different. 

This time he's not going to leave.

* * *

When bedtime comes, Tim unrolls his thick Boy Scout sleeping bag on the floor of Dick's ~~pigsty~~ bedroom. He can see peppermint wrappers and the shadow of an empty shot glass at the very back under the mahogany bed.

He's been lying down for some time, and his eyes must have closed, because he gets up with a small creak of spring. A sleep-foggy head leans over. 

"Hey," says Dick. "Whachu doin'?"

"Um..." Tim isn't exactly sure. He doesn't know what the protocol for sleeping under a blackmailee's bed is. Especially when said blackmailee is the city's second-most feared vigilante.

"Come here," Dick slurs. He pats the bed next to him. It's warm and inviting, and Dick has never looked at Tim this way before. Except in wet dreams, maybe. He's shirtless, and _shit._ Are those bullet pock-marks just under his nipples?

"Just lost a baby brother." Dick says in that sleep-heavy voice. He leers at Tim. "Y'know what that's like?"

"No," Tim answers quietly. He can hear the _thud thud thud_ of his heart. His skin has broken out in goosebumps.

"No!" Dick shouts. The knickknacks on the nightstand rattle. An old miniature teacup set and a set of Russian dolls bob their heads when Dick's voice sends a crackle of electricity to the floor. 

Tim stands up and finds his way to the door frame, keeping his back to it and hugging his panda. Yes, his panda. He may be fourteen, but he could be four for all he cared. Dick looms over him. He approaches closer and picks up the bear and stares at it, then bends down. 

"No." he whispers in Tim's ear, stirring his sensitive cochlear hair. His voice tickles Tim's feet. "No, you do not. And despite that, or maybe because of that, you don't hesitate, you miserable sack of spineless meat. You don't hesitate to take me out when I'm down."

Tim's knees are shaking. He tries to keep up a brave facade, but it's crumbling and he knows it. And worst of all, Dick. Dick looking at him like he's the most pathetic sight he's ever laid eyes on. Tears prick the back of his eyeballs. He shuts his eyes and takes a deep breath.

"Please..." he let's out, his voice a mouse-squeak. 

"Please _what. Speak up!_ " 

And his room must be soundproofed. Because his voice has reached jumbo-jet magnitude. Like a whiplash. Tim's ears are stinging. And, shame, on top of shame. He's eating a shame pie, he's rolling in shame. And now this. 

He has an erection. 

The body confuses fear with arousal very frequently. Maybe they aren't all that different. But a certain part of him, a _very_ small part, the part which wants him to undress and fap in the mall in front of all those people, _that_ part, is aroused. 

Dick notices. His smile gets harder, and larger. 

"Come back in bed, honey," he croons. "That what you want, eh? Well, Imma give it to you, sweetie. I'll tear your ass open. Imma hold you down and fuck you till your brain bleeds out of your ears." 

And now this is officially a nightmare. And there is no universe, _none,_ where Nightwing hitting on Tim is not going to be hot. But this might just be that teenie-tiny universe, that itsie-bit out-of-the-way galaxy, that one-in-forty-nine-thousandth dimension, where it might be just the littlest bit not. 

Where it might be just the _littlest_ bit...rapey.

And now there's nothing left to do, and nowhere left to go. 

"I love you." Tim sobs out. "I love you, and I'm pathetic, and I don't care, and I never would have taken advantage of you, I never would have told your dad what I saw, but I didn't care what you thought of me, because every single moment of my life is spent thinking about you, and when I'm not drinking you in I'm parched, and I'm sorry your kid died and I'm sorry I used your moment of weakness against you, and I'm sorry...

"I'm sorry I'm me."

Tim collapses against the rough grain of the door clutching his chest like there are white tubes sticking out of it. He gasps for air, struggling with his own chest. Dick puts his hand over Tim's mouth. Tim pushes against his warm dark hand clamped with a rigid finality and gasps with eyes white with terror. Dick waits to the count of three, then releases him. Tim coughs up thick white phlegm, his lungs pulling in all the air of the room like vacuum cleaners. 

"They make them more miserable each time," Dick says, slumping against the door.

Tim turns around, and punches Dick full in the face. Those three seconds of his life were the clearest three seconds of his entire fucking life. The three seconds in which he thought he was going to die, and saw the one face that he thought would bring him bliss and joy and fucking _purpose,_ gloating.

"You're a piss-drunk retard, and I can't believe I ever even so much as cluttered my mind with you."

Tim opens the door and storms out, and slams it behind him. The first door-slam in his entire life. And it felt good. It felt...righteous.

Dick tips his head against the wall. Sweat beads out on his forehead. It was cruel. But it needed to be done. He allows himself the small victory of a beer-cold smile, and a small fist pump.

Operation: Cure Little Wierdo is a success. 


	32. Chapter 32

At the beginning of Lent, Bruce has an awakening. Literally. He gets up shivering, his hair soaked in damp ringlets of greasy sweat, his breath shuddering in his throat. He has the beginnings of a religious fervor coming upon him; the feeling that something dark and great is afoot. He's driven to starve himself, and dreams unaccountably of angels bearing him up on feather beds of wind. _Jason Jason Jason_ is ripping out the very fibers and flesh of his being, carving out his heart, molding him into - _what?_ Who is he becoming?

A verse wrings itself into his heart, he gets up with it on his pale purple lips.

_The king was shaken and went up to the gate chamber and wept. And as he walked, he cried out, “O my son Absalom! My son, my son Absalom! If only I had died instead of you, O Absalom, my son, my son!”_

Yes, that is it. A sign, a portent. Bruce has to die for Jason to live. They are on either side of the eternal barrier, and are affixed to their positions. Like a seesaw, Bruce has to push himself down for Jason to rise from the murky depths of the Pit. 

* * *

" _Why_ do you need us to attend mass?"

"It's Eucharist. And I'm aware you're Roma, and I wouldn't ask this of you if it went against your tradition. But last I checked you were a not-so-stringent Protestant, though only on paper."

"Fuck you."

"This is not a judgement. I haven't been inside the church walls for years. Actually, ever since my parents died."

Dick stops, his eyes reading Bruce's face. 

"Bruce." He asks softly. "Why now."

Bruce has blue and green circles under his eyes. He uses concealer for public appearances. He knows Dick can be trusted, even if Alfred cannot.

"The house is changing. Birds which once sang outside our windows are gone."

"That's because they migrated!"

"Is that so. The barn owl nesting in the cave. _It_ migrated too? And the ash tree that has had its leaves since my father's birth? Where are all the leaves gone, Dick?"

Dick experiences one spine-chilling moment of near-conviction. Then his sturdy, everyday common sense reasserts itself. 

"It's just leaves, Bruce." He puts his hands around his father's shoulders, rubbing his warm forearms and leaning his forehead against Bruce's, looks him in the eye. "It's just leaves."

Bruce mewls furiously. "Our house has become a house of death. Ever since Jason...and God, I have to put things right!" He rubs his hand across his forehead with his skin creased, like a man caught between a raging river and a rockslide. His eyes are the eyes of a desperate man, a man staring into a blazing hellfire and seeing no way out.

Dick blanches. He knows that look. He'd seen Jason wearing it during the last few days before... 

He bursts out. "I know how hard it is for you and Jason to just _accept_ the way things are, okay? But frankly, between the two of you, I've had _enough_ martyrs for one lifetime! If you go, Bruce, I swear to God, though you be dead, I will never, ever forgive you! Is that understood? Is that clear? You will be dead to me Bruce! Dead in my heart! I will not keep alive your memory, or your legacy, and I will destroy your house, I will burn it to the fucking ground." Dick writhes and shrinks away from Bruce as if he has been burned, and Bruce tries to touch his son, tries to hold him, but Dick pushes his father's arms away, and he is so alone, and it is so unfair, and he was never, never going to see the end of it, because it wouldn't end with Bruce, would it? "I will burn everything", he screams. "I will burn everything, Bruce you hear me? And I will not cry, I will never cry for you...!" Dick shudders and stumbles and pushes Bruce's groping hands away once again, and grief and tumultuous rage war in his dead, bleating heart. " _Never!_ " he screams and goddamn is he hysterical.

After this enthusiastic reception, Bruce decides he needn't go searching for any other allies. He's on his own.

* * *

Bruce attends Eucharist in his old Episcopal family church. He sings hymnals and prays for better days for the community and gets absolved and greets people and takes the Communion on his knees. Things he hasn't done since the days he sat on his mother's flavored lap and held her hands while she smiled with rosy satisfaction and glowed with praise.

But when he kneels in front of the satin garments of the old priest and swallows the sip of wine, it feels like an iron brace has been clamped around his throat. His breath is squeezed out of his lungs, gently yet inexorably, pushing the gentle waves of life in him out into wisps of air. He looks down, and sees the onyx-laced cup filled to the brim with dark blood, gently oozing out of the bottom.

Blood. 

The sharp metallic taste between his teeth and under his tongue is blood. Bruce rises and walks out into the sun.

He raises his face to the light and smiles. Every omen is a double-edged sword, and he chooses to see this as a sign that it is his son's time to rise from the dead. After all, when God and the Devil are one and the same, which is the only thing Ra's al Ghul _had_ gotten right, then every sign is both a no and a yes.

* * *

Tim meets Stephanie.

"Who are you?"

"Your boyfriend's brother."

"Jeez. Just _how many_ of you are there? It's like a fricking clone army!"

Tim is mildly pleased that he resembles his family. Stephanie feels like a soft cocoon. "I'm here to tell you how things really happened. You deserve to know."

Ten minutes later, Stephanie rocks and moans. Her water has broken.

She feels the first wrench of the spasms that will wreak havoc on her supple body.

"AAAEEEEEEEEE! Please don't leeeeave meeeee!"

She wrings the life out of Tim's hand. For the first time in his whole life, Tim feels needed.

* * *

Three people set out for one grave. 

Dick decides to disinter Jason and take him to the Pit himself. For once, _he_ is going to be the price someone pays to get their life back. 

Alfred sets out to resurrect Jason to put an end to his young master's night terrors. He's scrubbed enough sweaty sheets for ten butler lifetimes. _He_ will be the sacrifice needed.

Bruce sets out because he has a monumental monster of a martyr complex. 

The 

grave

is

empty.

Three men, three generations, stand around one coffin, looking at each other. Each of them assessing the others to know if one them has it.

Has _him._

Finally, mercifully, the silence has exhausted itself. 

"Master Bruce."

"It wasn't me, Alfred."

"I know. If it were, you would have been gone by now. But if it wasn't you, and it certainly wasn't Master Richard, then..."

Bruce is bent down examining the heavy cherry lid of the coffin for stains, hair, scraps of clothing. 

"Nobody touches this." He orders, before walking back towards the car. Dick and Alfred stare at each other. Icy trickles roll down their necks, and their skins are growing tighter around their bones. The air whistles cheerily, but it is an empty, false cheer, filled with foreboding.

"Well, Master Richard," Alfred says, removing his coat and placing it around Dick's shoulders, warm and tight. But he can't think of anything more to say, so he settles for another "well."

"A corpse," says Dick. "A corpse is shambling around Gotham."

"Well, we don't know that for sure."

"No, we do. The _Lazarus_ Pit, remember? Why would it be called that? Why didn't we study this curse sooner, better?"

"Master Bruce did study it, if I remember correctly," says Alfred, rising, as always, to his son's defense. "It mentions nothing of resurrection as a side-effect."

"Well why not!" Dick says, running his fingers through his hair. "Why not, I ask you. We already live in a city of gargoyles and cannibalistic monsters and witch mothers. People coming out of their graves and walking around would only be the next logical thing."

"Sometimes I think _we_ are the curse," Dick says sadly. He sits on a gravestone.

"Master Dick, that is someone's gravestone you're sitting on."

"If he has a problem with it he can come out and tell me himself."

"I believe that happens to be a she," Alfred says, peering through the leafy wind at the granite slab. He pulls Dick off it and dusts his overcoat.

"I once thought you were the most stable of us three." He says, looking at Dick with a disappointment Dick can't quite grasp.

"But I suppose one bereavement is all a human is made to take."

Bruce walks back with a dusty fingerprinting kit. 

"You carry that with you all the time?" Dick asks.

"Best to be prepared," Bruce replies with a self-conscious proverbialness. Dick rolls his eyes and kneels besides Bruce. He notices that Alfred remains standing, on guard like a sentry, looking at the tall hedges and dim, wistful outlines of the elms, like someone expecting a ghost to roll straight out of the white spectral air.

"So, like, in Walking Dead, you know, they take them out, these walkers, with a shot to the head," Dick says, desperately trying to fill up the silence and the air stretching out between them. Bruce looks up, frowning, eyes with black currents raging under them, but Dick plows on. Now out of the corner of his eye he can see he has Alfred's attention too. "So, yeah. That's how they take them out. With a gun. Or an ice pick."

"Dick, I want you to stop _right now_ ," Bruce says very slowly, his face a blank slate, scarier than when it shows any outright anger or distaste. Dick knows he is struggling to master a powerful undertow of rage. 

"I think we need to be prepared for the worst," Dick says, enunciating very slowly and properly. 

Bruce gets up, and then there is a whip of air, and Alfred is holding him back and Bruce is grimacing 'get off me!' and trying to get his fist loose, his fists so tightly curled the palms must be bleeding and... _oh._

Bruce was trying to hit him. Thank God for Alfred's reflexes, which over the years he must have honed to become even sharper than Bruce's, maybe for situations just like this. Dick doesn't care to lose his perfect teeth. But more than that, he doesn't care to feel Bruce's ugliness over his body. It's not the pain. It's the marks and scratches which remind him, taunt him, that his father didn't care, _doesn't_ care, enough.

Which Bruce does. Or did. Before Jason.

Now all he cares for is buried in that box.

Or was.

Dick can be the asshole brother who walks away, or he can be the asshole son who stays and fights with his dad. Or he can be the nice guy, who does neither, and stays because his father needs him, and his brother is probably wandering somewhere lost and alone and scared, and if his wounds are still bleeding, or if God forbid he _smells_ , then Jason could die a hundred deaths, a thousand deaths, all over again. Like Frankenstein's monster. People are afraid of what they can't understand, especially when it comes wrapped in putrefying flesh. 

And that is not going to happen. Dick has a lot to atone for. And that involves sacrifices. Starting with his pride.

He looks up at Bruce, who is standing and staring at him. A whirlwind of emotions has left a trajectory of destruction on Bruce's face.

"I'm sorry," Dick says, holding out his hand. He tries a smile. He must have succeeded, because Bruce's face breaks out in fresh wonder. _The joys of parenthood. Constantly renewed, just like a sunrise. Over and over._

But Bruce steps forward and enfolds Dick in his arms. He wraps his arms around him tight, but not too tight, because this time Bruce remembers why it is a good idea to breathe. He wraps him just tight enough. It's warm and solid and muscle-dense: just what a hug needs to be.

Dick lays his face on his father's shoulder. _It's been too long._ Too long since any interaction of theirs was so..simple. Innocent.

"Welcome back," whispers his father.

"I never left," Dick whispers back.


	33. Chapter 33

The phones at the Daily Planet have been ringing. But everyone is out on the roof, watching Superman put the mascot back into orbit.

"Sorry," apologizes Lois sheepishly. She had been sitting in the roof grader, horsing around with Jimmy and Steve with the knobs and switches, and then suddenly--whoops! It was a mistake. Not a terrible mistake (since she hated it), but Lois's clumsiness is world-renowned. Good thing Superman was in the neighborhood. 

She's just killed two birds with one stone.

This has confirmed her suspicions. Superman shows up much faster for Daily Planet-related emergencies than almost any others anywhere in Metropolis. He's either employed here, or...he obsessively stalks her? As a habit? Which _should_ be disturbing, but she can't tell if it _is_. It's...complicated. She imagines him hiding in a dusty broom closet in one of the fire escapes below, ready to dash out to the scene of any emergency anywhere in the world, and dismisses this. Even though it's hilarious. 

Perry imperiously demands her presence in his office once they all troop down silently. He doesn't tell her off for the mascot, probably because (as she is just now realizing) he must hate it himself.

"Where is that good-for-nothing Clark?" he thunders, before dropping his pen. He looks at her expectantly. _Honestly._ The man must be mad if he thinks she is going to kneel down in her mini-skirt and stilettos and retrieve his pen from under the desk. _Thanks, Clark_ she mutters sarcastically under her breath, just as the man himself rushes in, his spectacles foggy and hair disheveled. He has the air of a man who ran out of breath, and decided to drop into the office to collect himself.

"Sorry, Perry," Lois sings just as Clark opens his mouth to say the same thing. He shuts it.

"Where were you?" Perry asks calmly. _Uh oh._

"Uh...in the washroom, sir." Clark injects a little straightness into his spine at the _sir_. Perry's scowl deepens. "I had these gyros with tzatziki last night..."

Perry holds his hands up in nervous surrender. This time next year he's going to be in Spain. Clark comes to a stop, looking sheepish. Lois presses her lips together to avoid bursting into a highly unprofessional giggle. _The nerve of the guy._

"Did I miss anything?" Clark asks, all wide-eyed innocence. 

"No." Perry pushes a white manila folder forward. "This is the Gotham case I've briefed you about. I want both of you on this. Am I clear? _You_ ," he points a sharp finger at Lois, "keep Mr. Magoo here out of danger. And _you_ ," aiming an accusatory finger at Clark, "Follow her lead. Unless she's jumping off a roof or something. I don't think Superman has as much of a thing for you."

Clark looks hurt and offended at this sentiment. Both of them ignore him. 

"I don't see why I'm being put on this mission, sir," he says just as Lois says "I don't see why he's being assigned with me."

Perry turns around in his chair in what is an obvious attempt at dismissal, but has long stopped working on Lois and Clark. He lights a cigar and leans back in his chair. Plumes of smoke rise from the top of his toupee as he waves a hand at them irritably, trying to usher them out the door.

"You make a great team, that's why. You keep up each other's morale. Now get out! I get ten minutes of peace and quiet a day and even that y'all can't--"

They get out and look sorrowfully at each other, the city girl and the farm boy. "I'm sorry I'm going to be inflicting you with my company," Clark says with baleful moon-eyes.

"Oh, shut your trap," Lois says wearily. "You're not sorry at all. Now get off your butt." (this is a strange thing to say to someone who isn't sitting). "We've got work to do, Kentville."

"Smallville," Clark corrects meekly.


	34. Chapter 34

The smell of powdery sweat churns through the air; a dry, baked kind of heat. The road runs with lazy newspapers dragging along in the dust, cobwebs, and diapers. Jason looks up and sees a small row of square, dilapidated outhouses; his field of vision stretches out to the horizon and back again like a yo-yo. The earth is one flat pancake, glistening in places with the piquant heat. He has a strange urge to kneel down and lick maple syrup off the surface.

He hums mechanically under his breath, dragging himself nearer to the ramshackle tenements falling all over each other. He's dragging something behind him; he takes a look and sighs. It's his foot. It's hanging on to his leg with black ligaments, stretching along like eels. One leg goes ahead, then the other hobbles forward, leaning on the first one. He's never going to make it like this on time. The sky is already growing darker. Swirls of caramel streak it on the right, hobbling across the sky just like him. 

He starts singing to distract himself. He doesn't know why, but he has to keep going, and he's never felt so cold in his entire life. His voice is a reedy, whining thing. Jason stops suddenly when he realizes it isn't right, and then starts again. But it's his voice. He tries to clear his throat, and sing. It's just a stupid old song, but when he was out on the street and the stars were looking down at him with placid amusement, this song made him feel watched. Remembered. Cared for.

_The owl watches, watches, watches. Watches all the time_

_Watches Gotham from a shadowed perch, behind granite and lime_

_It watches you at the hearth_

_It watches you in your bed_

_And when your enemies least expect it_

_It sends a Talon for their heads._

He reaches the first doorstep and sits down. It's warm. He has an odd feeling in the back of his stomach, like it is vibrating, pulsing forwards, pushing itself out. He looks down. He's wearing his snug red ladybug sweater, long-sleeved and homey. Memories come rushing back to him like a churning river: a summer day laugh, a flyhook, someone ruffling his hair with a teasing familiarity--but they drift away like water through a sieve. And now he sees he is holding his guts in his palms, and they look like a great bubble with several tiny bubbles all packed together and some fluid bulging out of it, oozing out like a school of red fish. 

Jason feels a wetness around the rim of his eyes. He doesn't know if it is tears, or salt, or just the air irritating his sensitive eyeballs. He wants to lie down and go to sleep. He wants to stand up and keep walking forever. 

* * *

Stephanie sits in blue midday moonlight with her head in her arms, the strong merciless glare laying her bare, open and naked, and sheets of coruscating blood mushrooming outwards. Jason sits next to her, arms solid and wordless holding her down, not letting her float into the light. Her flesh peels outwards layer by layer--she opens up like a flower blooming into a fruit or a cocoon making way for the butterfly to emerge. It is written, written in nature, as Jason would say-- _It's written, Steph, there's somewhere a world out there where you're still flesh and blood and not this filthy bag of parts of a part of me growing inside a part of you..._

 _JASONNNN!!!!_ she calls out and she throws her head back and dimly sees scrubbed heads masked mouths needles floating in blue light, and her skin fits her tighter and tighter until she is ready to burst, and Jason holds her hand firmly, thumbs circling saying _I'm sorry baby I'm so sorry_ over and over again and _I wish I could die with you I wish I could do this for you_ and her spine curls with the rockets of pain shooting from her tailbone to her skull, and she's screaming until mercifully the tube pumps into her body but no--she can't, she can't and she's screaming and ripping it out of her, it has to hurt, it _must_ hurt, because love hurts and this is the most precious kind of love there is in the world and she isn't going to lose it...but her spine curls again with another shriek, white hot pain dripping out of her, relentless, cruel, no pity, no remorse, and she feels her bones and sinews tear apart with every spasm of her body and throws her head back and screams and screams and red hot hands clamp down on her hard and firm and there's a sharp bark of a command _NOW!_ and the needle is sinking into the cream of her arms and she is screaming because _no, Jason, no, how could you do this to me?_ and she looks with betrayal in her eyes and the look in his eyes is all sadness and she whispers _baby baby no, baby don't be sad, baby don't die_ and he whispers back _promise me, promise you'll come back promise me you'll stay and you won't drift down down down, promise me!_ and she says _I promise, I promise, I promise, baby Jay baby I promise I'll come back_ and he says _I'll be waiting here for you I'll be there when you get back you're a piece of me_ and she says _you died how did you die why did you die?_ and he says Shhhhh _._ Sleep now.

* * *

"Do you know" Dick asks, and then stops. "Do you ever believe-- that things don't just end, just come to a full stop? Like Jason's baby, yunno? Maybe, for all the accidents in the world, this _one_ accident wasn't?"

"What makes you so certain it was an accident?"

"Wait, you're saying Jason _wanted_ a Jayby?"

"A Jayby?"

"That's what I'm calling it."

"No you're not. I'm not allowing you to insult my dead son with a horrible pun nickname for his baby. Are we clear?"

Dick's mouth twists with laughter. "Since when have you ever stopped me naming anything?"

Bruce opens his mouth, then closes it. 

"Batmobile, Batarang, BatCave," Dick counts on his fingers with a smile. He had proposed 'Batler' too, but that one hadn't passed. 

"Remember the time I tried to name Selina Batcat?"

Bruce smiles ruefully. Any mention of Selina brings on that rueful smile. Half-wish, half-desire. Dick wonders if he's connected the dots on the chain of events and arrived at the conclusion that if it hadn't been for Selina's network of petty thieves, Jason wouldn't currently be in his...predicament.

Connected the dots? Yes. But blame is something different. Dick can't remember a single time Batman has blamed _anybody,_ in his entire life.

Anybody except himself.

"Maybe Jason wanted something of his own," Bruce says after a while musing, his face hard with the harsh light of the monitors washing over it. His eyes are too-large, too skittish. He hasn't slept for three days, waiting and preparing for Jason's eventual resurrection. And now he is more feverish than ever. Dick counts three ceramic coffee mugs on the consoles, primly coastered. And those are only the ones he sees. 

"Hey, maybe you should take a break," he offers after a while. But Bruce is intent on the streams of data Oracle is sending over on the network, scrolling through endless figures and coordinates and police scanner reports. Dick has his own share, but he puts the tablet down after two hours, his eyes swimming. He's always been more valuable in the field than curled up in a settee with a coffee flask, trying to be all being geeky and detective-y.

Speaking of that.

"Hey, heard from Tim recently?" Dick asks, casually.

"Your boyfriend?" asks Bruce's voice sardonically.

He chokes on his coffee. Bruce turns to him with a raised eyebrow. 

Of course he knew. The bastard. 

"Yeah. My boyfriend," he echoes stubbornly. He's not gonna go down without a fight.

"Let me re-phrase. Your fourteen-year-old boyfriend?"

His face warms up. "He told you that."

"No. I did some research."

"'Course you did. Because since when have you respected my private life? Since when have you respected _anybody's_ private life?"

"Since never. Usually people hide things for the wrong reasons."

" _Interesting_ reasons, you mean," Dick spits out, the coffee bitter in his throat.

"Yes. That also. What does he have on you?"

Business, then. Business as usual. That moment had passed, like all things. There would be more moments, scattered across his life, but those were no truer of his relationship with Bruce than this right now.

"He's been snooping on me, off and on, since I became Robin. Even before that, I have reason to believe."

Bruce's features, under the shadows and the round brass light fixtures of the cave, look like sand and storm. They shift constantly, flowing from pleased to irritated, restless, peaceful, bitter and angry (which, contrary to popular superstition, is not very frequent). Right now, his features have hardened to granite.

"You have reason to believe. And you didn't bring this to me."

"No, because I didn't want to trouble you. You have enough on your plate as it is. And look, the guy is peaceful. Not harmless, but...he has this _placidity_ about him. He's easily mollified, and he doesn't want to hurt us, obviously."

"What does he want." Bruce's words are all bite and no bark.

"Me." Dick says simply. 

"Can't fault his taste," Bruce says, a low rumble in his throat. 

"No, can't."

"Does he want to be you, or want you?"

"I dunno. Doubt he does either."

"Hm." Bruce turns back to his keyboard and starts clattering away on it at 50 miles per hour, like they had talked about the weather. Dick settles back on his settee. 

"So. Jayby."

Bruce doesn't say a word, so Dick goes on. He tucks into a creche cake Alfred had left on the silver tray for Bruce, which, of course, has gone uneaten. 

"You're seriously not gonna be involved. In it's... _life._ "

"Only if Stephanie wants us to. And if she wants to give up the baby, that's up to her too."

Of course Dick has thought about this. The possibility of adoption. It still fills him with grief. This last part of Jason, given away to some strangers to rear and raise as their own. 

"I don't want that." He says, to the silent cave. He wants to weep out his anguish to the world. He wants to tear apart these walls with his tears.

"I don't want that!" he cries out.

Bruce spins back around in his chair. Hands steepled under face. Immaculate tailored turtleneck. Dick waits for the inevitable lecture. He waits to lash out, coiled up like a snake.

But Bruce looks at him silently. And then, in words so low he's not even sure he heard them,

"I don't either."

Apparently this acknowledgement of his sentiment was all Dick needed. He feels better immediately. _You're such a diva_ , he thinks to himself.

"If it's a boy, it's Jason." He says louder. "If it's a girl, well. You can get to name her."

Denial is one of his strong suits. Bruce knows it too. So he lets his son spin yarns in the air. They both know Stephanie will probably whisk the baby away so fast it will make their heads spin. They both know this may be their last and only chance to hold a baby that is remotely their own.

Other _people become fathers. Not us._

So father and son put their heads down and concentrate on finding the other son, the zombie, while Tim holds Stephanie, steadies her, for what will be the biggest jolt of her life.


	35. Chapter 35

Talia swaddles the baby in gentle cloth. It coos. She coos back. 

"The baby is strong. It will serve us well." Her father says, leaning over her shoulder, his sandalwood fragrance drifting over her. 

"You don't know that."

*************

The baby is six months old. It lacks for nothing. Wet nurses come and go because Talia's nipples have dried up like raisins. She is jealously protective of her loving, as she calls him. She doesn't want him getting overly attached to their bosoms. She bathes him under the soft palm rushes next to the lake, caressing his perfect round buttocks, her heart rising on wings.

He _is_ perfect. 

Ra's is also smitten. He orders all the Arabian delicacies under the seven skies to be made for his newly made grandson, seating him on his lap and feeding him sweet, fragrant _halwa_ with his fingers, pressing the sweetmeats into his soft bird's mouth, the berry lips already reflecting the beauty of his proud Talia. "You will conquer the seven skies. You will be the envy of the angels," he says as he rocks the baby on his lap.

Never too early to start being grandiose.

"Have you thought of a name, my child?"

"I have, father."

"Well?"

"It will not please you. It is English."

Ra's, with his rose-bloom around him like mist, waves this away. "His father was English, yes?"

"American."

"Yes, whatever. They're all the same, these Caucasians, with their attachments. But his son has not inherited his temperament, we will make sure of that. What is the name you have chosen, my daughter?"

She passes her fingertips over her lips. Bruce had not been unfaithful, whatever his other faults may have been. His heart was set on different horizons, that's all. Behind her the dusky dawn of the Arabian Peninsula begins to burst into birdsong, its early morning prayer chant. Pink filigree pours over the heaven like waves from the East. 

"I have decided, father, with your pleasure--"

"Your pains of labor have entitled you to that."

"Very well. Then...Jason. I have named him Jason. After the Argonaut."

Her father considers this crossly. He had not expected it to be so...mythical. But he had given her his word. And his word was not to be broken.

"Very well, my daughter." He extends his hand over her head, in the age-old ritual of the old imparting blessings and goodness to the young. Talia sighs with bliss.

"You have my blessing."

*************

"Stephanie!" 

The door swings open and Bruce and Dick walk in, laden with congratulations and presents. They play the part of visitors to perfection. No entitlement as members of the family in their glances or bearing. 

"Here she comes." Tim coos at the baby as he brings him of the white-fenced crib, wrapped in gauzy linen. It's tiny ears are flushed pink to the tips. Neither of them question Tim's presence there. 

Stephanie is silent. Her cheeks are turned to the open window, eyes locked out beyond the trees. She is breathing heavily under the blankets. Bruce and Dick sit silently, with the baby alternating between their laps. Being here is a joy they have known better than to expect, and yet, here they are. Their awed glances and worshipful caresses bespeak two warm, battered hearts which have had their last drops wrung out of them, and yet. 

Bruce has tears in his eyes. He has no expectations, but he raises the baby to his nose and breathes in. Dick is waiting to take his turn. The baby is a true definition of a miracle: effortless. 

"Can we keep it?" Dick whispers, as he smiles into the fleshy smell that clings to babies' hair and skin and neck. The smell of raw innocence. 

Stephanie still hasn't looked at them or acknowledged their presence. They are more than happy to spend the rest of the day just passing the baby between each other, feeding it with words from their mouths and light fluttery touches. Neither of them know shit about babies. 

"It is a him."

"I'm calling it an it."

"Being a person is--"

"Too much of a trouble to bear," Dick finishes for him.

"It it is," Bruce agrees. He is very agreeable. 

Tim goes and sits by Stephanie's side with a cup of tea. He brushes her flaxen hair out of the way of her nose, and holds the cup under, letting the smell waft into her nostrils. 

"Good, isn't it? Maybe we take a sip, yeah?"

Stephanie makes no movement. But Tim is infinite patience. He waits for five minutes in the same position, bent over her, tea under her nose. 

Finally she gets up and takes a sip. "This is sherbet," she says.

"Yes," Tim says. 

She makes no other comment. She finishes the cup to its dregs, then goes back to lying in the same position. 

"She doesn't want the baby," Tim goes over and whispers to a startled Bruce and Dick. They look at each other and at him. 

"It _could_ just be postpartum depression," Tim says. Then, "do you want to keep it?"

Stephanie has turned over a new page in her life. A baby would just get in the way. She can't find a way to forgive it, for any of it. Any of the pain it caused her. Every time she closes her eyes, she hears her moans and groans, of the time when she didn't know a thing, and thought making babies would make her magical. Selfless.

A hero. 

Isn't that what all mothers are? 

But she sees it now. A baby is nothing but an extension of flesh. Like a dead toenail. Except it has life, and it has a soul. Both paid for, because nature doesn't grant anything for free. 

She has to say goodbye, but she doesn't move, because moving might cause her to feel something, and she's not ready to feel just now. So she lies in a haze, drifting in and out of the dream she had once sold herself on, the dream that she could rise above her father. 

"We don't know much about keeping babies," says Dick just as Bruce says "yes".

They look at each other again, startled, roles surprisingly reversed. 

"How hard could it be?" Tim reasons. "Everybody does it."

This is a compelling argument. Bruce and Dick are born nurturers, both sickened by the emptiness in their lives. A baby is a responsibility, to some a mammoth too scary. But Bruce sees only the good times, one second at a time. The joy that will be his, as well as the sorrow. Dick thinks of Jason, coming back to the living, only to find out his family has sold his legacy, his child. Would he ever forgive them? Dick wouldn't.

Dick looks slightly panicked. "I'm not changing his diapers."

"Don't worry," says Bruce. "That's what Alfred is for."

"And clothes?"

"That's what Macy's for."

"I guess that only leaves the fun things, like feeding and cuddling," Dick says, brightening up. 

"If you think feeding is fun, you've got a ways to go," Tim says sarcastically.

Bruce narrows his eyes at him. " _You've_ got a ways to go, if you think I'm not going to enjoy feeding my son."

"I guess that only leaves the naming business." Dick says, with a smirk.

Both Bruce and Tim groan.

*************

"Why are we interviewing Bruce Wayne _again_?"

Clark and Lois are stuck in a motel room together, grating on each other's nerves, sticking on each other's rough edges. Each of them wishes they were on the opposite side of the world at the exact same point, the results of which would be hilarious if wishes came true.

"For godsakes, the guy has a life. Why don't _we_ get one?"

"You're only upset cause you both banged the fuck out of each other last summer, in a banquet hall no less. And now you're going to go and ask him underwear questions." Clark sneers.

"Underwear questions?"

"You know, who is he dating, who is he banging currently and and who has he just finished banging." 

"You're a prude, Clark, and you need to get some before you explode into hot curry."

"And you, Lo, are _jealous_." Clark stretches the word out deliciously like Play-Doh.

Lois slaps him. He has good reflexes, and uses the interim to do a lot of silly things at super-speed, like moving the requisite amount, producing the required grimace of pain, and causing his cheeks to flush by slapping himself. The results are worth it: Clark, in all his dorkitude, looking quite flustered and not a little browbeat as Lois stands over him triumphant with her fists at her waist. 

"I only slept with him to make _you_ jealous!" 

Clark's face deflates like a bouncy castle. Lois looks at him, like she is seeing him for the first time, like he is the first man on Earth.

"Not that you could ever take a hint," she says.

Clark's stunned face is Lois's pride. She should take a picture and go around showing people. _Look what I did to Clark Kent. This was all me._

Clark loosens his tie collar and clears his throat. "Lo, when normal people like someone, they don't usually go and sleep with someone else."

"I never said I liked you."

"But you said--"

"I can't _stand_ you!" she says hotly. Clark crosses his arms over his chest. He quirks one eyebrow, and his smile returns full-tilt, lips quirked rakishly, eyes twinkling. His hair sticks out at 45 degrees from both sides of his head. He knows he looks stupid. He doesn't care.

"Lo."

Lois stops tapping her foot and looks down at him. 

"Can I ask you a question?"

"What?" she growls.

"Can I...take you dancing tonight?"

"But what about the interview with Bruce Wayne? And the investigation into his son and--umphh!" Because Clark has pulled her down and pressed her into himself, kissing at her lips, eating them with glorious debauchery.

"Bruce Wayne can go to hell, for once." He says, pulling her back and looking at her steamy, flushed face and her annoyed mouth. "Why don't we interview each other for once?"

"I thought you wanted to take me dancing."

"Well, I, uh---"

"Come on, Kansas, you dork." She swats his hair down. but it insists on standing up. "Let's go outside and play." She grabs the keys and opens the door. She turns back and winks at him, her hair billowing around her face.

Clark smiles back.

"Right away, Miss Lane."


	36. Chapter 36

Shards of glass pour down on me like confetti, leaving red ugly paw marks down my cheek and throat as my eyes turn up towards the sky. I hear the wind rushing in my bones, and I look down and see my city disappearing beneath a cavalcade of clouds, and my wings outstretched, I soar on the light, sponge-drafts that now lift, now lower; my heart is beating in peace, in tandem with the beats of my enormous wings, sun glistening off white feathers. Why did I ever feel at home on land? This is where I am. This is where I am free.

I screech, and it is a mighty screech, and I dive into the sea of translucent beads of dew hanging in the gauzy air, down down down, forever down forevermore, my claws outstretching as I sweep, great wings fold around me like an arrow as I dive, and find my target. My talons squeeze, and the fidgeting body relaxes, the eyes are tiny sad beads, brown tail hanging loose. And I fly, and now I am in a majestic, magnificent cave, huge jaws of rock open in a fossilized granite grimace, water hanging off its jowls, glistening in its everlasting descent, and I sweep towards it, and descend into a dive, my body streamlined propulsion, into the marble skin of the water, and I emerge from the other side, and there are bats hanging beneath a somber sky of rock like upside-down lanterns. Red eyes stretching out, thousands of mesmerizing, brilliant, self-contained furnaces, each one a small world inside a world, black arms crossed over their chests, keeping their feelings to themselves, unmoving chrysalises, and I am not afraid, because I am home, and this is my family.

* * *

"We sing to you, Jason Todd, and give you wings.

"You have passed the test. You have fought your way out of your labyrinth."

They are white masks spinning in concentric disks, like the hierarchies of seraphim at the Assumption of the Virgin, their heads bowed, their wrists crossed in front of their robes, and they chant, and their chant is in Jason's ears, thrumming like a hollow drum--

_To see a World in a Grain of Sand_   
_And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,_   
_Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand_   
_And Eternity in an hour._

_A Robin Red breast in a Cage  
Puts all Heaven in a Rage, and _ _The Bat that flits at close of Eve  
Has left the Brain that won't believe.  
The Owl that calls upon the Night  
Speaks the Unbeliever's fright._

"Are you an unbeliever, Jason Todd?" they ask. "Do you believe?"

"Believe in what?" Jason's head hurts, they are not real, why don't they settle down?

"In us. Your father denied us with all the power of his might, all the signs we sent him he pushed away. So we left him in his gloom and darkness. But we're hoping you'll join me."

"I wish nothing but to return to my family. Sometimes it hurts, but I want, I wish, _back_."

The owl sighs. "You are bound to the Court of Owls for your resurrection, because your bones were calling for justice. You were abandoned cruelly, Jason Todd. Bruce Wayne may have taken you under his wing, but he has nothing to offer you, other than his own fragile home and dank grave."

"You forget, I chose. I _chose_ to go and inhabit him, and I chose my death over my life."

"And now we give you both back."

"Why? What am I to you?" Jason shouts. He is not sure they can hear him, they are so far away. He tries to make his way through the gales and white sunlit fog, but they drift farther and farther away.

"We are you," it choruses. "We are the Owl. All the perished, all the children trampled underfoot in Gotham's inferno of greed and terror. All the orphans, snatched away in a rain of tears and howls. We have been watching you, and we knew you would find your own. All things come full circle. But then you rescinded your own destiny. And we saw, and we swooped. To protect you from the dungeon, but it was too late, and you were gone. You were slipped. Into the bowels to be crushed in the molten pieces of hell."

"So you did the next best thing. You brought back my rotting corpse."

"Become one of us. Become one. Together, we are strong. We save. Our talons are everywhere. Our children are signs to the great, that the owl is never far away."

"Sorry, but I'm already a bat. Although I appreciate the offer."

"We are incomplete without you."

"And I am incomplete without my family. Is that what you want?" he cries. "Then take me! And I will forever remain bereft of my heart, but take my soul, why don't you?!" 

"Your family allowed you to perish!" the Owl screeches, its bloody wings flailing.

"My family _saved_ me!" Jason screams. " _I_ killed me!"

The crest of the owl, smooth as marble, is timeless quietude, an eternity of questions silenced with a terse, deathly look. It's plumage is a featureless stream, its breast a naked crest, the plump vulnerability of a mother. It is serene, and deathlike still. It waits, and a naiad drop trickles out of its left eye, the eye that is turned inward, that is all white, but with the whiteness of sight, not blindness. The masks surround and stab the owl with steely knives; tiny trickles of blood dripping out of a thousand ghastly streams. The owl is unshaken.

"Why do you take it?" Jason asks softly.

The great owl slowly lowers its head, and Jason has seen nothing more graceful. _Sh_ _e stoops to conquer_. It opens its beak, and the words pour into Jason's ears, a cascading hum, rising and falling, but forming no words, only pure meaning. "I am its mother, don't you see? It hurts me because it has to. Because that is what it do."

Jason understands. 

"We must die. One day. Without new blood, we will drift away into the cloud and the sun and the light. Owls need darkness. But now the Bat has taken what is us. He has trained them to take vengeance as parts of themselves, not as a greater whole. And so they fall and die."

"They? Who else? _Dickiebird_?"

"Dick Grayson. And another. Whose approach we feel like fire in our blood, who is already under your father's wing."

"Oh God." Jason's breath fails and he trips over his feet. His throat feels too short. His life is ebbing from his fingers. 

"Send me back, please!"

"You are already back," the owl says, and was that a hint of rarefied anger? "You are back. You are close. You are a dream. You slip out, and lo! You are another dream, closer to the real, but still only a flow. A shell of a being. A shell of Earth. We return it to you."

The Owl gently lifts its wing, and Jason has never seen anything more glorious. It strokes Jason's cheek with one snowy blood feather, like a zephyr. It feels like a hundred soft cotton and cream and silk sheets. Jason leans into the touch. He breathes in, and smells oud and another feather, of green diaphanous prayer and gold filigree scabbard glinting in moonshine. He wants to go. He wants to come. He doesn't know which is which. 

* * *

"Why do we fall?" Bruce's father asks him once, after he fell. 

"I dunno," Bruce mumbles, sleepy eyes satiny in the mellow light of the night lantern. 

"So we can pick ourselves up." His father whispers. He settles back into the large maroon Bergere resting at the foot of Bruce's bed, and Bruce has to squint to see him over his toes. 

"That's stupid. What's so great about picking yourself up? Everybody does it. And besides, what if you break your neck? Then _someone else_ picks you up."

His father sighs. "You know, my father used to tell me that. And I never tore it apart. Where'd you get this annoying streak, buddy?" 

His father calls him 'buddy' habitually. It makes Bruce feel ashamed for some reason. Like he needed to act more grown up.

"I dunno," he mumbles, feeling soft and small. He rolls up tighter into his snuggly Star Wars blanket, a solemn ball of compact drowsiness. He's had his wind knocked out of him by that fall and he knows the moment he closes his eyes the bats will be back, pattering and knocking against his eyelids. So he asks his father to read him a bed time story. 

"Sorry kiddo," his father says, stretching out his arms, his knuckles cracking gently as he exercises the joints. "Office all day. Tired. Some other time, 'kay?" 

"Okay." Bruce says, again feeling vaguely guilty. 

"Sleep tight, kid." His father leans over him, mustard and aftershave. He kisses him, then he nuzzles his hair.

Bruce smiles. 

When his father has almost reached the door, Bruce asks in a small voice, "Dad?" 

"Yeah, son?" 

"Why don't you ever call me Bruce?" 

His father turns around. In the soft half-light, Bruce can swear he looks almost startled. 

"Huh. Never thought of that, bud. Bruce. Is that what you want me to call you from now on?" 

"No, sir. Buddy is good."

"Okay." His father's 10 o'clock shadow makes for an impressive amount of shadowy scruff. Almost like a a mask. His dark hazel eyes look...relieved. 

"Sleep well, then. Oh, and son?" 

"Yeah?" 

"Remember what I said, huh?" 

Oh. He meant about the falling. 

"Whatever, dad. I'll probably forget it by tomorrow."

Thomas Wayne chuckles darkly. Now _that_ sassiness he can place. Martha. Martha all over. 

He closes the door and pads lightly down the corridor, humming. His son, he says to himself. _His_ son.


	37. Chapter 37

"Why does it feel like they're always _more_ of them?!" Dick screams, backflipping off the wall and sweeping his foot. There is a satisfying thump on the ground, and the sploshing sound of wet .

"Because they're always more of them!" Tim screams back, spinning a broom deftly like a fucking _bo_ staff, the business end flying around like several witches' hair nests, grappling with each other. 

"Ahh!" both boys scream, hugging each other with their eyes zipping out and back in, while a cruel laugh rings off the walls. A voice too childlike, too...innocent, and yet. Capable of such hideous spite. They almost would not believe it, if they weren't seeing it with their own eyes...

The baby, sitting on freshly diapered pink bum, flings water-balloons with a savage aim far beyond its years. It laughs maniacally when they make impact. Both boys shriek as the last of the barrage, a water balloon to end to all water balloons, twice the regular plumpness, a Big Mac, a King Size, makes its way flying towards their heads. But it is too late. It hits their faces with a _splat_ like a wet frog fart. 

The baby lets out a hideous cackle and starts clapping. Both boys, drenched wet and soaking to their marrows, let out a groan of relief and let their shoulders deflate like bobo dolls. It's a wrap.

Alfred hurries in and carries off Damian to bed. He suggests tactfully that perhaps bed would not be inadvisable for the boys either. Both nod like dutiful sons and go upstairs, then slink into the Batcave through the back entrance behind the coathangers deep in Jason's closet.

Whose idea was it to put in a fucking _pole?_

"It's time," says Bruce when they arrive. He's been running scans on the new Robin equipment. Today is the first day, and Tim is...relieved. He had been half-afraid Bruce wouldn't go through with it, and half-convinced Dick would talk him out of it. But after three consecutive months of twirly sticks and arm-ripping pushups and protein cokes and vitamin popcorn, Batman says he is finally ready. For a _trial_ mission.

Bruce scans their swamped states with an ironic eye. "Better change out of those. Don't need my toy soldiers catching the common cold."

"Jeez, thanks," Dick says, heading towards the stalls. He swivels back towards Tim, who is still looking mesmerized at his brand-new, spickedy-sparky, all glowy and freshly polished and screaming with Bat-effort utility belt, bulging with ultra, uber, superduper-modern megatronic batquipment. He realizes it's going to be bigger and better and more advanced than anything Dick as Robin utilized. He congratulates himself. Now all he has to do is stay alive and he can do wondrous things. 

"Coming Timmy?" Dick calls. "I'll even go down on you if you're _nice_ ," he singsongs.

Tim gives him the finger. He is all absorbedly eye-worshiping his new suit. But Bruce is working at the consoles, and Tim is torn between wanting to see what he is up to and drinking in his new costume. Finally he makes a compromise and drags his suit next to the monitors, where he can keep one eye on it and one eye on whatever Bruce is doing. Right now it looks very complicated and equation-y. Last time, it had been a hypothetical time machine. He had told Bruce he needed to get employed. For real. 

"Are you...playing chess?" he asks, brow furrowed. 

"Yes," Bruce admits, with a sigh. "And I'm losing." 

"With who?" Tim climbs up next to Bruce and puts his aftershave next to his face. Bruce sighs again, peering at two different monitors on either side, one hand manipulating digital chess pieces and the other running some calculations in the background. 

"You're using a computer? But that's cheating!"

"It's Oracle. You really think _she_ isn't."

"Fair," Tim admits. Oracle _did_ tend to see computers as inseparable from herself or anything she did as a person. Dick had once told him, when he was drunk on highballs, that his sex life basically involved making love to a screen with Oracle on the other side. Tim said he felt sorry for Dick. But Dick shrugged back. 

"You get used to it, after a while. The power of your own sensual and tactile imagination. It can be intoxicating. Of course, she doesn't leave it _completely_ up to my imagination, I mean--"

"Okay, stop." Tim held up his hand.

"Jason," says Bruce. The overhead lamps dim and the monitors fade to black. He raises his hands and folds them behind his head.

"So you lost, huh?"

"It was a draw."

"I was watching, dumbass."

Three months ago, Tim would have flushed himself down the toilet before he ever called Batman that, but now he knows how to rub him the right way. Bruce wants, above anything, to be pals with his sons. The man has a negligible genuine social life, and hides out with bats in a rock dungeon for months. Tim figures he has to compensate with his kids' company. 

Bruce yawns. "I want you out of the shadows and back home at the first sign of trouble. But I'm not fool enough to trust you. I have installed a remote taser in your suit. Disobey me, and you will feel an electric jolt. Continue to disobey me, and the jolt will get higher. Understand me?"

"You mean like the _Milgram experiment_?!" Tim asks, wobbling between horror and fascination. 

"Like a bat out of hell, an _undead_ bat, may I remind you, is roaming Gotham. One son of mine is a zombie, and I don't know what's wrong with the other. I'm not pushing you down the same amusement ride."

"Lol. I'm telling Dick you said that."

"He won't believe you. Also, did you just say lol?"

"That's a word," Tim affirms.

"No it's not."

"Is now."

"Is not. Nobody asked me."

"That doesn't make it not a word."

"It does. Now suit up."

************

My head's under water, burning under a scorching tapful. I remember why I do this. I don't remember the wherefore. I shake my head like a shaggy dog. Water spheres glint out from where I shake them off me. The warehouse burns beside me, three hundred pounds of coke incinerated, along with eight skeletons. They'll find the skeletons but they won't be able to ID them. Doubt those suckers have dental records.

I get on my motorcycle, the purr of my thrumming engine, sturdy and sleek, making me grin. I like the feel of the dusty handlebars under my fingers. I like curling my hand around something steady and feeling in control. 

I take off, hair rippling in the wind. _My_ hair, jet-black and smooth. My fuel won't last another thirty miles and I have to get it refilled, but right now I can't bring myself to care. I feel...alive is not the right word for it. I feel unthrottled. Like someone was pulling the old puppet-strings and now they've suddenly let me hang loose, and I've discovered I'm beautiful, and I'm okay. 

I don't know how I find my next target. I just know I do, because I forgot and now I remembered. I remember the cranky Mr. Rochester-type who lived in the old bakery off the Island, where I used to work. He would let me have a warm loaf on fine mornings, in exchange for a blowjob. I would give him the blowjob. Naturally, the loaf I ate after would be miserable. But at least I was pretty, and I could get to give blowjobs and earn a piece of bread. The ugly ones didn't even have that. No one wants to put a pecker in ugly mouths.

I remember Bruce, for some reason. I remember waiting up at night, for him to come and feel me up or something. But he never came. He came once to check on me, once to tuck me in, once or twice to read to me. But he didn't ever put his hand or his mouth where it didn't belong. And slowly, I began to trust him, and forget there were monsters in the world. I forgot all those other kids out there, the ones with stinky peckers in their mouths for a loaf of bread. 

I knock on Mr. Rochester's trailer door. The guy's made something of himself as a weed dealer, seems like. All the better. Sweetens my deal.

He comes out. He's big and bearded and sure the years have laid their mark, but otherwise he's not ugly. There's a chipped off nail on his left hand,which looks like it's been through a grinder. His eyes look like they're swearing at you for looking into their murky depths. He used to sometimes pat me on the back when I'd finished, I remember now. Used to offer me a sweet to wash down the taste. "My wife never does this for me," he used to say. "And I suppose it does nobody any harm."

He's going to be ugly when I've finished with him.

He recognizes me. Sees the biker jacket, the leather trim. The set of my lips, clamped tighter together to keep down the bile. The hand moving to waist, where my holster is. He sees, and he puts together everything. 

He chews on his tobacco meditatively, then spits out into the sidewalk. There's greenery and shrubbery and insect leaves and all the things that shouldn't have to touch his spit. My bile rises, filthy, torrid sweat beads breaking out on my nose. Two of his bottom teeth are the color of urine, and when he opens his mouth to speak I see his tongue looks like a sunken elephant. 

I put the gun in his own mouth. I've learned not to gaze into people's faces as I pull the trigger, makes it harder. His eyes go all panicky and fidgety. He hadn't expected it to go down so soon. He had expected we would have a nice long chat about something. Then dinner, before he got his testicles handed to him. Well fuck that. 

I pull the trigger. The sound makes me blink. I always keep my eyes closed a half-second longer than I need to. 

I open my eyes. He's lying on the tarmac, blood ballooning out of him. He's dead alright. His face has become a contortionist, expressing something only dead people can understand. Regret, maybe. Well fuck that. 

Too late for that, asshole. 

************

The Owl told me I have siblings. Plural. Nice to see Bruce could live without me. Even nicer when someone moves on and gets someone to stand-in your place, keep your seat warm. But it's not like I've been replaced. I understand. Bruce is like a widower who needs to fill this empty place in his heart, or else. 

Or else he'll collapse. 

So yeah, I get it. But I can wait to see the bunch of them again.

Now I have work to do. Not like when I was Robin, and I knew the lines drawn and the fingers crossed, when every step brought with it the possibility of danger and disappointment.

Now there's only danger, and the possibility of thrill. I'm bound by an invisible thread, seeking me and finding me, stretching and seeking, like a spool, unwinding me, unwinding my destiny. I'm Alex, without any of the clock. My path is set out for me, and because it's _my_ path, I seek no others. I hum Ludwig Van as I sashay down the street in the newest Florentine boots, feeling pretty and decorous. Everywhere, newspapers fly announcing my presence. _The n_ _ight terror, the bloody wonder. The red revenge. The death's hood._

Red. Death. Hood. Blood. Only two of those words could fit in my rhyme. Which two would it be?

I tried Death Hood. Black. Fearsome. But it didn't shine. I couldn't dance through the night in a costume of black and be very well remembered for it.

Finally it came to me. Red Death. 

_No._

I try to sleep in Cobblepot's apartment. He wouldn't be back for years, given he was currently serving twenty. And it is a perfectly good flat, carved and furnished like some crystal paradise, filled with ornamental knickknacks like ruby-throated birds of sunrise and parakeets and such-like.

I went to sleep. It came. 

I would be the Grim Reaper. My face would be a mask of blood. All around me darkness would swirl. My head would be caped in a shroud. Like a shawl thrown over. A hood.

I am. Red Hood. 


	38. Chapter 38

Talia al Ghul awoke with sunrise. 

She walked out of her tent, hair billowing behind her in a cloud of mermaid waves. It was her turn to be with her son.

Her father, for all his strengths, tries to mold Jason into too much all the time. A great swordsman, a great horseman, a great gymnast, a great alchemist, a great forensic scientist. 

_For God's sake. He's only_ one _._

She had shown potential, and she had risen. Through the ranks, with guile and cunning. But Talia al Ghul's wounds still thrum beneath her skin when she sleeps at night. They span across her back and shoulders and abdomen, nasty-smelling lakes of pus oozing out of her body. The Pit lets you heal, but it never lets you forget.

And now her son. More of the same. He's already been left on the baking hot amber sands, where he had to hop on one foot then on another, for six hours, in order to stay alive. He'd come back with second-degree sunburn all over his feet. Talia's heart had burned in her mouth. But her father (who arguably loved Jason better than her) said he hadn't become the Demon's Head without anguish far, far worse. "I want the best for him, my daughter. I want him to be me."

And Talia understood. While she applied cold cream and aloe extract to Jason's small, bleeding feet, she sang him songs of warriors. Warriors whose feet had once harshed bare sands, until the day they were their own, and they told the desert come, fight us, and the desert shrank.

Jason was a quiet boy. His eyes shone with a light Talia couldn't recognize. It was a quiet, sombre, inner light. "The boy is peaceful," her father said proudly. "Even his rage will be peaceful. Like the crack of thunder in a clear sky. His enemies will not know what hit them."

So she fenced with her son, and every time he would fall, she would gently bid him rise. She would nudge him up from palms and knees, gently, gently lead him through the motions of scorpion and snake and Roman. His tiny hands would tremble. And she would let him take a break. As many as he needed.

She wanted him to associate mercy with her. So when the time would come, his loyalty would fall into place as naturally as a pebble into a well.

Because the time _would_ come. She could feel it's approach, stirring her mother's heart like autumn leaves churning in a breeze. 

She had to take over from her father.

And then one night, when father and daughter were duelling under the sands and over the stars, they received word. The Detective had been born. He had taken on the mantle he was born to wear. 

"Praise be to God," Ra's said.

And Talia striked.

*************

"Did you really think, my daughter, that I had taught you everything?"

Talia bucks like an errant camel. Her wrists are chained down with black iron cuffs to the the sand, the sinews of her back exposed, her modesty outraged. Each tight, stinging whiplash brings with it the dizziness and nausea of one who is accustomed to pain, but never gets used to the sickness. Her shame, her everliving shame, the humiliation in front of her tribesmen, the repungance of her father, are all but pinpricks to the mortal agony of her suffering. Because outlined against the desert heat, she sees her son. The teal of his eyes stands out against his caramel skin as he stands in his pristine white _thawb_ , looking down with shock and dawning horror.

Once the reality bursts upon him, he screams.

The Head smiles bitterly. In his bitterness there is an anguish mirroring Talia's.

"Let the boy watch," he motions to his aides. "Let us see if his loyalty lies with his teacher and the head of his tribe or his stray donkey of a mother."

The boy moves toward his mother. He lays his cheek besides hers, under the shadow of the whip.

"Go, my child." Talia whispers. " _Go._ Live. Obey your grandfather, my soul my heart. I will find you, or I will live on within you. You shall not lose me either way."

The child climbs onto his mother's bleeding back. She groans and grimaces and tries to shake him off. But he will not budge. He raises his robe and exposes his thin reed back, then lies down in the soft shredded flesh.

" _No!_ " Talia cries out.

The boy, about to receive his first whiplash, which also would be his last, is intervened for by his grandfather, tight-lipped and hollow-eyed. His humiliation is complete. 

"Please father, let him go," screams Talia, writhing again. "Please. Don't you see? He doesn't know what he does."

But Jason looks up into stern lion eyes. A hand grips him too firmly, the mouth bespeaks endless cruelty. And he says the first word of his life. The word which would seal his fate. 

"Ummi."

****************

Batman prowls in the austere night, the fluid lines of his form filled with the easy grace of the Hunter. An archetype that has been recognized since the dawn of the struggle between man and beast--he is everything man has feared, everything he has longed to epitomize. The night is his partner, his friend, his lover. Here, he comes alive. What is inhuman of him becomes sharply defined sinew and bone: raw animation. He awakens.

Bruce smells in the night deeply. Some have called him a vampire, and the truth is he is much closer to vampire than human. He preys on the very air of the night; he feeds off of it. The night tells him things it does not tell anyone else. 

He listens to what the night has to tell him now. It hides in its swathes of shadow a song--one lonely ballad, sung untunefully. Bruce's heart twinges with a secret grimace. The smells that waft over him are the smells of humanity's most unearthly creatures, the people most alienated from their actual selves, or living their worst selves. Streetwalkers, cut-throats, muggers. People Bruce has to try and stop from consuming themselves and each other, and preying on humanity's soft underbelly while it sleeps. But in all of that, there is another song out there, and he knows it. A song like his own. _Another_ heart, that beats faster in murk and gloom than it does in light. It's strong and It's fast and it's larger than life, but it's not a hero. Wherever it goes, death goes with, hand in hand. Bruce feels the small clench in his stomach, the hollow that is thrumming and throbbing with need, with desire, to hold his son in his hand and feel his skin and know, with the evidence of his own eyes, that he is indeed... _real_. But what keeps him from following the trail of bodies? What keeps him from putting an end to the reign of terror, the horror show that Gotham is slowly becoming? What kept him from putting the leash on _his_ wild creature, the bird that _he_ tamed, or thought he tamed, until it broke free and molted into a a whole new set of feathers, the bird that had painted itself free? 

Is it admiration? A reluctance to face the results of what he has wrought? A feeling that Jason should be given some time to make his mark on what was, after all, his city too? Whatever it is, it keeps pushing Bruce steadily in the opposite direction of where the current impels him, where his hunter's instincts tell him lies the kill. He is a war within himself. His heart is ripped in twain: the two halves steadily opposing each other. A foe he cannot pummel, he cannot wrench out, he cannot assuage or please. Whatever he does, he is of two minds.

So he runs. He runs forwards, and away. He runs towards and backs out at the last minute. He has almost got him, then his legs are bearing him home. 

He is going insane.


	39. Chapter 39

Talia runs with her a small sticky hand clasped in her own. The Rub al Khali has two modes of death: quick and slow. Rattlesnakes are the best way to go, but failing that the sun will get the wandering soul, within hours a dizziness and lack of orientation begins to affect the uncovered head. Loss of a sense of direction is soon followed by hallucinations, and frightening visual dreams, something the nomads call 'desert madness'. The sand is a foe, the sun is a foe, the air is a foe. And the child? Crying for his mother's milk, the dried up breasts heaving in the thin cotton tunic. The child cries. And the mother is going mad. 

She picks him up to her chest. They lie down in the desert, her back to the hot sands, his little body enveloped in her soft, fragrant one. She holds him to her breasts and he tries to suckle, but there is no milk. She knows. Still, she lets the suckling distract him. Her eyes shed a single tear. The sun beats down on them with its impersonal savagery, but she doesn't care. She will wring his little neck, and it will all be over. Then she will lap up the sand, and wait for the heat to do its work on her body. Her father will find his legacy ravaged in the desert, curled up in arms, and he would see, and he would know. That the Demon does not have children. That the Demon does not deserve to be passed down, from father to son to grandson. It is a burden to be carried in only the strongest of arms, and her arms are sagging. The Demon should be borne alone.

Six hours later, as Ra's and his men scour the surface of the Earth, they find black vultures hovering over the body of a woman, with a child buried under her. A spring gushes at their feet, clear and blue as crustal. But the woman and the boy are not moving. They have joined the dead. The sun has had its revenge on those who would brave its cruelty. Ra's approaches, and kneels by the side of his daughter. Her face is calm, majestic. In repose. He knows he has lost the Pit. The Pit's daughter, was given to him as an _amaanah,_ a trust. And he has stuck a dagger into that very trust, so precious and so rarely reposed. He can carry on no longer. The Pit will not give him back his life any more. But Ra's, looking at Jason's sweet smile, tucked into his mother's precious, pearly bosom, feels all the envy in the world.

Perhaps it was for the best. Perhaps he has no more reason to live. 

And then he sees it. 

Jason.

Kicking. 

The stream that gushes like moonlight springs out where his body lays the sands. A miracle of the desert. 

Or a mother's love.

Ra's picks up the boy. Instantly, the stream stops. It sinks into the sand, where it sprang from. Ashes to ashes. 

A tear trickles down Talia's face. Her bosom is cold. Her feet start sinking into the sand. 

"No!" Ra's cries out. His daughter, his precious daughter, his only daughter, his legacy, his life. 

His self.

Sinking. The ebony strands of hair swirl down the drain of the desert, reclaiming its daughter, its innocent. Ra's tries to hold on, tries to drag her out of the quagmire of his own sins and faults. But deeper and deeper she sinks, until all that is left is a little finger. A little pearly finger. Ra's kisses it, before it sinks. 

And now the boy opens its eyes and starts wailing. He looks around for his mother, but his mother is gone. Gone, gone, gone so deep, she must be in the bowels of the Earth by now. Back to her mother. 

_Ummee! Ummmmmeeeeeeeee!_

The desert is filled with wailing brush and crying scrub, the very sand seems to echo a timelessness of a grief. Every particle of sand glints in Ra's' eyes, screaming _monster, monster, you did this to her, you did this, and now she is gone, and you did this, and your son cries out against you, and will you feel, oh now, will you feel? Now will you repent?_

But it is the Head of the Demon. And the Demon's head takes orders from no man, or desert. He draws his sword and approaches the demon sprawling and crying his heart out mother, mother, and holds the sword above the boy's head. The boy looks up, the sun glinting off the blade into his eyes, and winces. It would be one sharp, clean stroke. And he would be beyond the reach of even the Pit. 

As he looks into the eyes of his hopes dashed and dreams past, he imagines he hears a voice. _Do this, and immortality shall be yours. For eternity you shall wander, and though you will kill yourself several times over, yet you will never die._

_Never die._

Everything he had ever wanted. 

Jason lets out a scream as the blade descends for his head.

And it stops. It grazes his soft throat. a thin stream of blood trickles out. Because Ra's al Ghul once had another name. And he once had another conscience. Another way. 

And that way did not involve hurting children.

"Go," he tells the boy, while he struggles with his traitorous hand. "Go, lest I find you!"

And the boy gets up and runs. He runs, and he runs, and he runs to the ends of the Earth. The grandfather recovers himself enough to give chase once Jason is far over the horizon, a small speck disappearing into the sky.

"Oh desert," the Head descends on his knees and prays, for what will, he is sure be, the last time of his life. "Protect your offspring, the son of the Demon."

Jason is bound to an invisible thread. Fate, destiny, or whatever it is, pulls him to the land of his ancestors. And there it leaves him, to find his own way.

Confident that he would be back.

********************

"He's poking around all the wrong people," Dick reports, arms crossed, legs splayed wide. Dick always occupies space meant for two. Even three if he could. 

Bruce's face is a mask. It's the mask Dick knows so well, it's even a joke for Bruce to put it on for him. It's the _keep your messy emotions out of my way_ mask. The _I know better than you_ mask. 

"A surveillance expert. A firearms trainer. A mixed martial artist. He's brushing up on his training, but it's not just that. It's more. He's learning. Things you never wanted him to know. Never wanted any of _us_ to know."

Bruce still hasn't turned around. Dick decides the direct approach is called for.

"Are you... _protecting_ him?"

Bruce turns around in his seat. His eyes are dark. His face looks like it's looking at a stranger, and not a very polite stranger at that.

"I told you to lay off the surveillance on Jason," his tone is clipped.

"Don't you take that tone on me, mister. I know what's going on here. You're back to the weird protective papa mode. Jay isn't your son, anymore. He's someone different. Something else."

Bruce's face is telling him this is the wrong take on the matter. But Dick is not so easily silenced.

"Your _son_ would not have ripped up three smack rings with a Beretta. Your son would not have knifed admittedly slimy pimps in a goddamn alley, Bruce!

"You're not seeing clearly! And I thought I was here to help you see clearly. You always used to say that. _Correct me when I'm wrong_. Tell me that isn't the case anymore, Bruce, and I'll be gone. Tell me you don't think you need correcting anymore, and my ass is _out_ that door. I've got places to be too." 

And maybe he didn't have places to be, not really. Barbara had dumped his ass last week and he hadn't even worked up the energy to fight, to tell her why it wasn't a good idea. Give me one good reason, she had said. Just one. And he had stared at the concrete floor, and the water dripping from the pipes behind her, and he had looked out at the sky for anything, any clue, and he hadn't found it. Not one.

"You and Bruce. Bruce and you," she had said. "You're like goddamn fish in a barrel. You couldn't get any tighter if you wanted to. He's obsessed with Jason, just as much as you are. You're both--"

And she had paused, and looked around, ashamed of herself. Of her surroundings. Of how she was behaving. 

"I'm sorry," she whispered, because Barbara was raised to be polite. 

He wasn't. 

"Yeah, Barb, 'cause only one of us is allowed to have obsessions, right?" 

And he had flown out, with the look on her face imprinted on his mind. The look of a baby, surprised by the world.

"This discussion is over." Bruce says, getting up. He has almost swept out the door, when Dick stops him with a firm hand planted in the middle of his chest. Bruce's stare is all daggers. 

"We're not done. Sit down," Dick says. He tries to push Bruce back into his chair, and it is telling for the amount of muscle-mass Bruce's put on ever since his recovery that he doesn't budge. Not an inch. It's like pressing against rock. 

He sweeps around and ducks under Bruce's knee which is just coming up to crash with full force into his abdomen, and it's telling that they're still in sync, even pitted against each other like this. Each one of them is on their toes, circling, trying to find that chink in the armor that is just a gap too much. Their bones are rusty with disuse and years of sitting in shadows and taking on assailants far lesser than themselves. With joy, almost, they spring for each other's throats, grappling and wrestling with all the weight and punch they have to hold back in the field, until they're rolling around on the floor, neither of them giving an inch, solid steel against supple pine. It isn't about some mutual need for destruction or rage. It's the purest form of expression known to man: dance.

And when they're finally panting and lying next to each other and passing a bottle of chilled mountain dew between them, their browns heavy with a sheen of sweat thick with musk, they hear a clap. Slow and poisonous, emanating from everywhere, from the rock surfaces to the stalactites. _Clap, clap, clap._

"Nicely done. _Very_ nice." it purrs. "Erotic and tortuous in all the right ways."

The voice is whiskey laced with glass shards. Bruce's spine has stiffened. Dick's hackles are beginning to rise as they scan the shadows, back to back, the old Batman and Robin deep in their bones coming to play. 

And then a mask steps out from the mouth of the T-Rex. It's wearing a worn-down leather coat, holes and all. The mask appears to be floating because it's legs are still in the dark, where you can only see the outline of things, but not their real form.

" _Really_ exquisite, I have to say."

"Jason."

"What's up, Pop."

Bruce swallows. He is looking up steadfastly, like there is no other voice in the world.

"I guess I had to come to the mountain after all, seeing as how the mountain was refusing to come after me, despite the lovely horror show out there. Are you sure you _aren't_ more ostrich than bat?"

Bruce's brain is whirring. Dick's jaw goes slack, like he's never seen a resuscitated sibling before. Jason waits for the shock to settle in. But really. This was the dullest part. 

Finally, he sighs and slides down the dinosaur's tail. "So do I know how to make an entrance or what?" he asks finally, just to fill the empty air more than anything. 

But this isn't anything like he had expected. Because in the middle when Bruce and Dick didn't know where to turn, they had turned to each other. Back to back, like two old friends. And all his emptiness has dried up, and now he just wants out of here. 

He fires the wire.

Both of them shout out.

"Wait!"

But Jason Todd is quickly disappearing, speeding down the tracks made for the Bat-monorail, which was never completed. 

Except this time, when he looks in his rearview mirror, he sees two headlights flashing. The engines' roar drown out all other sounds in the dark tunnel as the end rushes towards him.

They're on his tail.

_This time, I will not let you go._


	40. Chapter 40

It's scary what people manage to forego and forgive. 

Bruce forgave me for tearing apart his city. But can you really blame the man? He's nearly forty, and his city is the same mess as the one he started out with. Well, maybe the players have changed. But it's still a mess. And he doesn't believe in guns. And he doesn't believe in bullets. But he's allowed a police force to run and ruin this city with both. 

I figure he's asking why not me. 

And he doesn't like the jacket. That is why I wear it. It protects me from the ice of knowing I'm his son, and the chill of knowing I can do nothing about it. 

Because the resurrection taught me one thing--blood is the strongest magnet there is. It's like a thrum in your veins. It doesn't let you be free, or happy, unless you _belong_ somewhere. It pulls you, slowly but inexorably, towards...your family. So I wrap the jacket tighter and tighter around myself. It's the only thing between me and Bruce. 

He stares at me across the dining table, and I know he can feel it too. 

But he doesn't say anything. These days, Bruce doesn't say much of anything. It's like he's gotten some idiot notion in his head to become a mummy. He only talks to the baby. Constantly. Small murmurs that nobody can make anything out of. Like a secret language. 

That baby is a demon. A real horror. He shrieks and cries and wails and screams like a thousand armies, and I'm telling you, I'd rather face those thousand armies than face him at his worst. Even Alfred takes cover. The only one who braves the storm is Bruce. 

My respect for the guy is through the roof. When he handles my baby. 

_My_ baby. 

I still don't know how I feel about that. 

**************

I go to visit Selina. She's sick, and around her d-- _bed_ there is this sea of like, _hundreds_ of solemn faces. Looking on like they don't know what they'd do without her. I kneel by her bedside, and I take her hand. She smiles at me. She knows me. 

"Jay..."

"Shh. Don't talk."

She's small. Real small. Her eyes are delicate, and green around the edges. I've heard that witches have to be old, because magic eats away at youth. All it leaves is a hideous shell. And that's what she looks like now: a shell. Her skin has become papery. Her breath is weak. 

She reads the pity in my eyes. Hers go sharp. Some of the old cat is still in there. 

"I've lived my share, Jay."

"No don't say that."

"Shut up. Let me finish. I don't...have anymore. In me. To give."

Something about what she says and the way she says it makes me think of Bruce. I push that cardboard box away.

"Promise me, Jay."

"No. I ain't promising _nothin'_ lady!" I get up screaming. 

"Promise me," she insists, holding my hand. Now she's crushing it. With all the force she has. A stupid tear makes it down my cheek. _Stupid._ That she should be reduced to this. A little child's pinch. 

"No. You're not getting to do that, you hear me? Cause you're gonna _live. You hear me?_ " I hiss out. 

She didn't look like she wants to hear me. "Promise me you'll take care of the kids," she says, and her whisper is tinny. 

She falls back with the effort. Some saliva flecks her lips. Her face is still pretty, but not the sort of pretty you'd wanna fuck. The sort of pretty you'd wanna keep in a box. To protect it. 

I don't know what to say. The kids remind me of honeybees when the honey queen dies. Don't they immolate themselves or something? These kids don't look very far from immolation. They're bug-eyed and pasty-looking. None too fresh from sunlight. I suppose I'm supposed to feel pity for them. But I've never been very good at conventional emotions. 

"I can't," I whisper, because for some fucking reason I don't want the droogs to hear me. 

"You can, and you _will._ They know you. They trust you. Because you're one of them and they smell it on you. That street smell you can never wash off with all the rich-ass shower gel in the world. Trust me, I've tried."

She sits up and coughs and coughs, her dry lungs hacking away at the air. I know better than to extend a hand. Selina's been known to scratch eyes out for less.

She's asking me to take over for her. Be...Papa Red Hood. Or something. But I just don't see myself surrounded by so many young hoodlums, directing them from the shadows, tugging up their scruffy jeans, and packing them off to bed.

Or maybe I _do_ see it. Maybe I see it too well.

Selina watches me, bottle-green eyes knowing. She's twisted. She knows I see it.

She knows when to push a deal, and when to lean back. 

"I want it," I say finally. Because I do, and because I'm not gonna orphan, like, some whole _tribe_ of children. I've been there, and it's been U.G.L.Y.

"Goddammit, I want it." I curl my fist into my palm and hit the heavy air with some emphasis.

I don't know what I was expecting. Some jubilant shouting maybe? But the kids simply melt and disappear into the walls and floorboards, drifting away as silent as anything. 

One last kid catches my eye. He's wearing a ragged sweater; his feet are covered in sheets. Well, strips of sheets. Must be sores. His eyes are like nothing I've ever seen before, save one. They remind me of...myself.

Actually, they _all_ remind me of myself.

So that's what was unnerving me about the whole deal. 

It was like looking into a hall of fucking mirrors.

****************

Dick asks Bruce if he's ready. 

Bruce says yes. 

"Between you and Red Hood," he says, "the city will remain safe. And entertained."

Nightwing and Red Hood had challenged each other to a dance-off on a rooftop. It was broad daylight. Loser was to get a swirly. 

It went viral. Bruce had fired them both. Something about 'safety' and 'secret identity' and 'the importance of being an urban legend and not doing puny mortal things like having dance-offs'. 

But given the fact that Bruce had also fired _himself_ the previous morning, it didn't have as much of an impact. Also the fact of giving no salary. 

Now Dick wants to wear the cowl. Bruce suspects he wants to woo Barbara, who's always had a thing for it. But it maybe it is more than that. 

Maybe the boy is ready. He's been waiting in the wings a long time. 

"You will bring to the Batman a grace and wisdom I could only aspire to." Bruce tells him. 

Dick puts on the cape, the heavy leaded one that is now his. And it feels...just right. 

Just right.

*******************

Bruce buys Damian a new outfit. It's a navy blue sailor suit, complete with eyepatch. 

"Master Bruce. Damian has _sixty three_ baby suits already, not counting the ones he's outgrown in the last couple of months. I hope you _do_ realize you're setting him up to be a very spoiled child." 

Bruce gives Alfred a cold look. He goes back to playing with his baby. He's recently bought him a TinkerBell wind up doll, and it's the only thing Damian hasn't broken, because he likes to wind it up and watch it sing. 

"The boy has the heart of an artist," Bruce says. His voice is like rust. 

He's made that observation before. Several times. Alfred and Dick just nod. Bruce goes back to teaching Damian how to draw. 

"He also has good reflexes," Tim observes. 

_Jesus, Tim_ , Dick thinks. _It's like you're stepping in it on purpose._ Because Bruce hadn't so much given up the mantle as turned his back on it. Damian is to be nothing like his father. Any mention of his 'reflexes' or his 'fighting spirit' is severely frowned on by a Bruce who is now no less scary for his no longer being the Batman. 

"A focus for his obsessive tendencies," Tim says in the Batmobile. When Dick looks over at him he smiles shyly. 

"I would know," Tim says. 

"Looks like you got your happy ending," Dick says. He doesn't activate the cowl's 'growly voice producing thing', as he names it, when he's in the car alone with Tim. 

Tim leans forward in his crinkly costume and kisses Dick's honeysuckle and lime cheek, lingering just a little too long on his afternoon stubble.

"Looks like we all did."


End file.
